Building a better Britain?

In early December the Treasury announceda £375bn infrastructure investment plan,with three quarters of the funding coming

from the private sector. In a BBC Radio 4Today programme interview the chiefsecretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander,explained that Canadian and Australianpension funds were here to help with worthysocial projects such as extending the runwayat Birmingham airport. In the Treasury's spinthis was a win-win story because "after yearsof neglect our infrastructure … needsrenewal". It is worth pausing a while todeconstruct yesterday's news because there'sa backstory here about failed assumptionsand broken promises, which helps to explainthe mess we're in.

Privatisation was about a promise ofinvestment. Whenever state assets were soldoff, the promise was that the newlyprivatised firm would tap the capital marketsto bring in investment which the cash-strapped state could not provide. This ishow Vince Cable and the government arguedRoyal Mail privatisation was necessary andbeneficial. The rationale was much the samein the 1980s floats of BT and British Gas orthe 1990s privatisation that broke up BritishRail.

The promise of private capital expenditurewas not delivered, except in water. That wasa special case because new regulations madeinvestment in clean up mandatory and theregulator allowed the companies to chargethe consumer and put the cost on the bill.Elsewhere, the private operators wereinvestment- and risk-averse corporates underpressure to deliver shareholder value: theirbusiness model was not to bring ininvestment that would lower return oncapital but to extract distributable cash fromthe legacy infrastructure that they hadinherited from the state.

The sound you hear in the background afterprivatisation is the giant sucking sound ofvalue being extracted by pipe and cableutilities who have failed to renew ourinfrastructure. The results are most obviousin telecoms. BT is bidding for sporting rightsagainst Sky, yet not investing in the

replacement of old copper wire, so we havethe compromise of fibre-optic cables runningonly to street cabinets in towns, not topeople's homes, and no working plan fordelivering rural broadband. Currently, rail isthe only utility where large-scale newinvestment is going in and that is becausenot-for-profit Network Rail can issue state-guaranteed private bonds.

So, privatisation has brought usunsustainability and growing problems aboutnational security. Second-rate broadbandprovision is bad for competitiveness andworsening problems in energy supply haveworrying national security implications. Weare ill prepared for cold weather when wehave a fortnight's back-up gas storage, and inelectricity, there are questions about whetherthe clapped-out generating system can keepthe lights on. That is why a desperategovernment is bribing the French firm EDF toconstruct a new nuclear power station atHinkley with extravagant guaranteedelectricity prices.

More broadly, the infrastructure plan showsthat the government has learned nothingabout how Thatcher-style privatisation doesnot work in capital intensive utilities. Theinfrastructure plan includes more of the samewith the sale of 40% of Eurostar, a studentloan book and bits of this and that. Butselling assets will not get the government outof its current fix on infrastructure investment.The furore about energy prices showsconsumers won't pay and the governmentcan't pay, so where is the investment going tocome from?

The infrastructure plan shows that theanswer is to bring in a second set of private-sector players (mainly pension funds andinsurance companies) who will now providethe fixed capital investment. But this comesat a price, because the funds will add asecond set of financial claims on the revenuestream coming from household consumers ofutility services, whose bills will effectivelyinclude one charge for operator dividends anda second charge for interest on fixed capitalinvestment.

Maybe it wouldn't be too bad if the pensionfunds and insurance companies were British,because then what comes around goes www.cresc.ac.uk

CRESCNewsISSUE 18 MARCH 2014

ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change

around. Inside our national economy, thedouble extraction would be a transfer fromall households that consume utilities towardsthe minority of retired households. But in thegovernment's £375bn investment plan only£25bn will come from six British insurancecompanies. So it is retired Ontario andMelbourne teachers who will benefit.

We need an alternative plan forinfrastructure that recognises some basicrealities. First, regulate privatised operatorson the assumption that they are bothextractive and investment averse so theirmargins should be modest unless they canprove they are taking risk. Second, rearrangedomestic financial flows so that Britishpension funds can invest directly ininfrastructure including social housing. MostBritish pension funds are earning no morethan 5% from paper investments, why not getthat from building something useful?

Note: An earlier version of this articleappeared in The Guardian, Comment is free,on 5th December 2013

Karel Williams

In this issue:

The Hidden Musicians of BlackBritish Jazz p2

Urban (In)Security p3

The social life of big data p4

Peacelines: Constructing the urbanterror imaginary p5

Unpacking Post-colonial RelationalEntanglements in the BrazilianAmazon p6

Welcome! New recruits at CRESC p7

CRESC Conference p8

CRESC News Issue 18 March 2014

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In the UK, music is widely promoted as anexemplary ‘creative’ industry. Yet, withinthis hyperbole, jazz has been largely

ignored. Our forthcoming report WorkingLives in Black British Jazz suggests that thisneglect is both economic and cultural.

The jazz economy is widely perceived as smalland insignificant. Yet in terms of production,participation and employment, it ranks closecomparison with both folk and opera, formsof music widely perceived to be viable andvital components of the UK music industry.Also, in terms of revenues, Mykaell Riley andDave Laing estimated in The Value of Jazz II(2010) that the annual turnover of the UKjazz sector in 2008 to be in the region of £85million, including over £30 million in musicsales and around £25 million in ticket sales.However, rarely has jazz been the target of

significant commercial or public investmentto further stimulate production, or develop itsaudiences and markets.

A major part of the problem is that -notwithstanding a few established venues,labels and performers - the jazz economy isquite informal, diffuse and difficult tomeasure and map. Nonetheless, estimateshave consistently shown that audiencesnumbers for jazz are equivalent to (and oftenexceed) audiences for art forms such as folk,opera, ballet and contemporary dance (see,for example, the Taking Part StatisticalRelease, DCMS 2012). Despite this jazz is a

largely ‘hidden’ economy, mainly taking placein small clubs, pubs, halls and arts centres,ranged across the UK, and rarely enjoying anymass audiences or media exposure.Evaluating the economic significance of jazzis therefore a complex task, and supportingits practitioners and audiences fraught withdifficulty.

At the cultural level, the neglect of jazz is noless depressing. Jazz has long suffered frombeing seen as an esoteric or minority pursuit,one that falls somewhat unsatisfactorilybetween ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ music. Andunlike folk, with its impression of beingindigenously rooted in UK or British nationalhistory, jazz is still often seen as a culturalinterloper – an American or African import, aform of music that is somehow alien or non-indigenous to the UK. As one of the musicians

we interviewedsuggested:

‘..jazz comes fromblack America, soconsidered to beunderground, thedark part of life andnot considered to behigh art. The Queendoesn’t go to watchjazz…’

This culturalmarginality hasmeant that jazzhasn’t attracted itsfair share of publicsubsidy or support.It was only in 1968that the Arts Councilof Great Britain firstbegan to awardsmall bursaries to

jazz musicians. Today, Jazz Services – ArtsCouncil England’s principal National PortfolioOrganisation supporting UK jazz – receives abasic annual funding of around £300k topromote jazz and support touring musicians.

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Our report makes a small contribution toraising the economic and cultural profile ofjazz in Britain by choosing to illuminate theworking lives of black British jazz musicians,building on our previous AHRC project Whatis Black British Jazz? The focus on blackmusicians is not simply a matter of social andcultural justice, important though that is. It isalso to do with their vital contribution to the

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A major part of the problem is that - notwithstanding a few established venues, labels and p

Evaluating the economic significance of jazz i

The Hidden Musiciansof Black British JazzMark Banks, Jill Ebrey and Jason Toynbee

making of a uniquely British jazz, onewhich reflects the cosmopolitanism of thecontemporary UK. Black British musiciansenrich jazz culturally and musically, and intheir educational work show how jazz canbe an empowering means of uplift andinspiration for black and white youth.

As for focusing specifically on musicians asworkers, the purpose here was twofold;firstly to bring to light the everydaydifficulties of surviving as a professionalmusician, a significant problem oftenoverlooked in creative industry policy-making, and especially difficult for blackand ethnic minority workers; and secondly,to augment the barely-establishedliterature on the UK jazz economy – notonly with further survey data, but morefully with some detailed qualitativeaccounts of working lives in jazz.

Amongst the many findings our researchrevealed:

• A rich history of jazz music-makingamongst black Britons, reaching back tothe earliest days of jazz itself;

• The provenance of modern and ‘free’British jazz in and amongst post-warCaribbean migrants;

• The economic difficulties endured bycontemporary musicians – with over 70%earning less than 20k per annum; jazz is‘precarious’ labour exemplified;

• The persistence of racism and raceinequality in the education system andmusic industry – resulting in restrictedcultural and economic opportunities forblack musicians;

• The continued vitality of communityeducational projects and DIY culture inblack British jazz.

The report will be released in the spring,please contact one of the authors above forfurther details.

Photo by Javier Parra issued under aCreative Commons license; for details pleaseseehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/arteunporro/

1Randomly, we might compare the supportfor Jazz Services with, say, the BournemouthSymphony Orchestra which on its ownreceives around £2.5 million p.a.

CRESC News Issue 18 March 2014

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Urban (In)SecurityFrancis Dodsworth

Passing through any major city one canhardly help but be struck by theubiquity of security apparatus, from

the watchful presence of CCTV in thestreets, on buses or trains, to benchesdesigned to deter tramps or skateboardersand occasionally even metal detectors at theentrance to public buildings. Thesesecuritised spaces are patrolled by an arrayof public and private security personnel whoare able to regulate who can come and go inshopping centres and other privately ownedplaces of public resort. Indeed, the impact ofCrime Prevention Through EnvironmentalDesign has led to the city itself being shapedin relation to security, with speciallydesigned hallways and car parks, evenhousing. The city, in short, has itself becomean agent in the fight against crime.

But does all this security apparatus make usmore secure, or make us feel more secure?There is some evidence that better domesticsecurity systems and car alarms havereduced rates of burglary and vehicle crime,but despite overall crime rates falling(whatever that might signify)

2fear of crime

remains high. Indeed, in her book GroundControl Anna Minton suggests that theprivatisation of public space andsecuritisation of the city has intensifiedpublic fear about crime and produced asense of dislocation. The riots that engulfedLondon and many other English towns inthe summer of 2011 might seem to bearthis out. Indeed, the riots in London wereonly one of a series of periods of urbandisorder that have erupted across northern,southern, eastern and western Europe, fromSweden and the Baltic States, to Paris andAthens. Many scholars see such events assymptoms of the social dislocation producedby neo-liberalism and globalisation. Thedeliberate policy of undermining thesecurity provided by the welfare state in thename of ‘flexibility’ has produced groups of‘urban outcasts’ in the words of LoïcWacquant, or a new ‘precariat’ in thelanguage of Guy Standing. From thisperspective the securitisation of the city is apiece of ‘security theatre’ designed todemonstrate the capacity of governments todeal with intractable and internationalproblems of which they are themselves thecause.

In order to try and understand how thesecuritisation of the city is shaping social life,Urban Experiments has launched a newprogramme of research into the subject. Thisproject seeks to engage with contemporarydevelopments by providing an historicalperspective which does not assume that thepresent day is uniquely marked by securityanxiety. There have, after all, been concernswith crime and disorder as major ‘socialproblems’ since the eighteenth century; theprojection of social anxieties onto ‘urbanoutcasts’ and the ‘dangerous classes’ is, asGeoffrey Pearson showed us a number ofyears ago, one of the great continuities ofmodern history; Clive Bloom hasdemonstrated that riots have been arecurrent feature of London life; and moralpanics and media-driven crime scares haveexisted for as long as there have beennewspapers. Judith Walkowicz’s classic City ofDreadful Delight illustrates very well thesensationalism around the Ripper murders inlate nineteenth-century London and theconnections between these crimes andcontemporary social anxieties. More recentwork by Peter King and Esther Snell,published in Continuity and Change in 2007,and an edited collection by David Lemmingsand Clare Walker on moral panics ineighteenth-century England, show thatsensational crime has been central tonewspaper reporting throughout the modernperiod.

If there is nothing novel in urban insecurityper se, however, this does not mean thatthere is nothing distinctive about its

particular manifestation in the present. Thespecific configurations of security technology,practices and culture nonetheless form adistinct ‘assemblage’, one that requiresdetailed study to understand. Two of themost penetrating studies of the distinctivenature of our contemporary securityapparatus are provided by Harvey Molotchand Sophie Body-Gendrot. In his book AgainstSecurity Molotch studies in depth and indetail the practical and precise ways in whichour attempts to provide security are oftencounterproductive, dysfunctional andalienating and suggests some ways that wemight modify our behaviour as a society tobetter achieve our goals. Sophie Body-Gendrot, meanwhile, has produced a detailed,comprehensive and carefully researchedstudy of the ways in which the governmentof our cities, and thus our cities themselves,are being transformed by particularconfigurations of risk and risk management.

In order to push forward our research in thisarea and to generate new conversationsaround the subject, Urban Experiments isorganising a one day conference at the OpenUniversity’s Camden office, 27 June 2014, onthe subject City Materialities, City Securities,which will explore the relationship betweenthe urban assemblage and the securitisedcity. In order to begin the discussion thisconference will be preceded by lectures fromProfessor Body-Gendrot (Paris Sorbonne) andProfessor Molotch (NYU), to be delivered thenight before, Thursday 26 June, 18.00 at theRoyal College of Physicians in London. Anyoneinterested in the subject is encouraged toattend what should be a fascinating andproductive pair of events. Attendance is free,but places are limited, so you are encouragedto book in advance by emailing CRESC-OU-events@open.ac.uk

For further information on this project contactfrancis.dodsworth@open.ac.uk

2For the pointlessness of recourse to ‘overall’rates of crime see the excellent comments byRichard Garside at the Centre for Crime andJustice Studies:http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/resources/making-sense-crime-trends andhttp://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/resources/property-crime-violence-and-recessions

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CRESC News Issue 18 March 2013

The social life of big dataCamilla Lewis and Yannis Kallianos

In January 2014, we began a new researchproject about big data and urban wastemanagement in collaboration with the

Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority(GMWDA). The aim of this project is toexplore the role of big data as an integralcomponent of socio-technical systemsdesigned to promote re-cycling and tominimise the use of landfill sites. Ourresearch in Manchester feeds into a largerproject on ‘Socialising Big Data’ whichinvolves a network of researchers from anumber of different institutions (CRESCManchester, Goldsmiths’ College, Warwick,Anglia Ruskin and Lancaster Universities).Weare comparing three fields of data use andpractice among EU statisticians, genomicscientists and waste managementpractitioners. The research will alsocontribute to the CRESC ‘Infrastructures ofSocial Change’ research group who areexploring infrastructures as analytical andepistemological tools for understandingsocial change. By adopting an ‘infrastructuralperspective’ we explore how big data worksat different scales and across differentcontexts. The project seeks to examine thepossibilities, limitations and expectationswhich are emerging around big data and isalso exploring how collaborative methods canfurther our understanding of the interplaybetween data, technology, knowledge andmateriality in processes of social change.  

Big Data

In recent years the fields of business,government and academia have seen theintroduction of new forms of data. Broadlyspeaking, ‘big data’ refers to the vastquantities of information which areconstantly being collected by newtechnological devices. They include, forexample, data which is generated and storedat every card transaction, from internetsearches and from geolocation data which ismade available by mobile phone networks.The turn to ‘big data’ analytics has raisedcomplex issues of behaviour change, riskmanagement and harm prevention which areframed in terms of data collection, mining,aggregation, visualisation and synthesis.While many commentators have re-iteratedthe need to respond to the ‘data deluge,’ thisproject takes an alternative approach. Ourresearch seeks to develop a ‘social literacy’about big data by exploring the movement ofdata across different sites. We hope toexplore the successes and failures of the turnto data in ways that recognise their

constitution in diverse social practices andspecific situations.

The field of waste management is in aprocess of transformation. Waste was onceprocessed through a relatively simple landfilldisposal system but now it is sorted forincineration, recycling and re-use through ahighly complex, multi-tech wastemanagement system. Local authorities obtaindata on the tonnages of waste they collect inorder to calculate the total sum of wastewhich is being recycled and diverted fromlandfill. The tonnages of recycled materialsand residual waste are reported to Defra, atthe national level and the EU. Financialincentives are awarded to local authoritieswhich are able to divert waste from landfilland penalties can be incurred by those whichunder perform.

Collaborative Research

Our research seeks to examine the ‘social life’of big data within the GMWDA. Through anethnographic approach, we explore how datais produced, stored, analysed and interpreted.We are also looking at how data movesacross different sites tracking the ways inwhich data moves across the nine districts inthe authority and between the GMWDA andtheir partners in Defra and the EU.

In May, we will hold a workshop, called a‘collaboratory’ in which members of theGMWDA and their partners from other wastemanagement sectors, and from other cities,will discuss working with big data alongsidesocial scientists. A ‘collabatory’ is a method ofinterdisciplinary and cross-sectoral

engagement for exploring the range ofmeanings and implications of the turn to bigdata across different practical settings. Thepurpose of this event is to experiment withand develop new methods and ways ofproductively engaging across our domains ofconcern. We will experiment in co-producinginsights and ways of thinking about big dataand will explore the following questions: Whatare the possibilities and challenges of workingwith big data in urban waste management?What can be counted and measured using bigdata?  How is big data analysed? What cannotbe counted in big data?  How are big datasources different to other types of data?

Waste management in Athens

To complement this study, a parallel researchproject is being conducted in Athens whichoffers a radically different context of wastemanagement practices. Contrary toManchester, where big data has taken on aprimary role in driving recycling and wastepolicies, in Athens, waste is predominantly sentto landfill. We plan to draw comparisonsbetween Manchester and Athens in order toexplore the contrasting role of data, and theimpact of EU directives on waste management.

For more information please see the following:

‘Socialising Big Data’ project website:

http://sloddo.wordpress.com/projects-2/socialising-big-data/

CRESC ‘Infrastructures of Social Change’ website

http://www.cresc.ac.uk/our-research/infrastructures-of-social-change

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CRESC News Issue 18 March 2014

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Peacelines:Constructing the urbanterror imaginaryNiall Cunningham

There is probably nothing material thatbetter embodies the Northern IrelandTroubles in the public mind than the so-

called ‘peacelines’ which divide highly-segregated Catholic and Protestantneighbourhoods across urban NorthernIreland. The most famous example is thatwhich bisects West Belfast, a colossalstructure up to 18 metres high cleaving apartthe Catholic Falls and Protestant Shankilldistricts. In an ironic manifestation of the‘peace dividend’, the wall has become a ‘mustsee’ attraction for visitors to the city. Yet theFalls-Shankill peaceline is not simply a relic ofpast conflicts, it is a stark comment oncontemporary social realities in the city andacross Northern Ireland more generally.

Since the signing of the Good FridayAgreement an increasing amount ofacademic and popular attention has come tofocus on peacelines. Despite the fact thatNorthern Ireland is some fifteen years onfrom the establishment of a newconsociational political dispensation whichhas brought nationalists and unioniststogether in a devolved power-sharingexecutive, and notwithstanding the fact thatfor many, the Troubles would seem to havebeen substantively ‘resolved’, the number ofpeacelines has increased significantly. Duringthe Troubles the existence of these defensivebarriers was easier to justify in the face of thethreat posed by paramilitaries, but in a timeof nominal ‘peace’, they often appear tooutsiders as socially retrograde andanachronistic.

Another reason for the attention thatpeacelines garner is that they are alwaysfeatures of ‘interface’ areas. These interfacesare the contested spaces on the margins ofsegregated Catholic and Protestantneighbourhoods, where some of the worstdisturbances in Northern Ireland haveoccurred since the ‘end’ of the Troubles. Thelast few summers have been marked byincreasing levels of serious and sustainedunrest in interface areas around the Ardoyne,New Lodge and Short Strand often arising outof conflicts over the routing of Orangeparades. There can be no doubt thatinterfaces were, and remain, areas of violenceand tension between the city’s nationalist

and unionist populations. There also seemslittle to contest in the idea that peacelinesaugment fear and mistrust betweensundered populations and stymie economicdevelopment by stigmatising hostcommunities. Yet critically, new researchunder Theme 5’s banner suggests that therelationship between peacelines, interfacesand political deaths during the Troublesneeds to be re-assessed through thedimensions of both time and space.

In recent years, a body of academic literaturehas emerged which has deployedGeographical Information Systems (GIS)techniques to map the location of fatalitiesoccurring as a direct result of the Troubles.

These have accurately identified that deathstended to occur in areas which were highly-segregated, deprived and in proximity topeacelines. Such analyses therefore raiseprofound questions about the role ofpeacelines in understanding the geography ofthe political conflict, and potentially aboutthe instrumentality of these securityinterventions in influencing patterns ofviolence. However, there exist twofundamental problems in assessing therelationship between peacelines and patternsof conflict fatality. At a geographical level,Belfast’s ethnic geography is so complex thatmuch of the city can be seen to lie withinreasonably close proximity to a peaceline orinterface. When analysed at a much closerspatial resolution, the data suggest thatwhile death rates were high in proximity topeacelines they actually increased withdistance, peaking some 200 to 300 metres

away from the structures. While thedistances might appear insignificant, againstwhat Bollens has described as the city’s‘hyper-segregated sectarian and peacelinegeography’, these distances frequentlyrepresent the difference between the coresand edges of tightly-clusteredneighbourhoods like the Falls and Shankill.This directly echoes the influentialanthropological work of Allen Feldman, whofound that it was actually within these cores(or ‘sanctuaries’ as he termed them), that theTroubles increasingly played out over time.

The relationship between deaths andpeacelines becomes more problematic whenthe temporal element is factored in. Themajority of victims during the Troubles diedtowards the early period of conflict, with 1 in6 deaths occurring in 1972 alone. Yet themajority of peacelines were built in theperiod from 1995 on, a time when the peaceprocess was well advanced and the overallnumber of conflict deaths was long past itspeak.

These findings have clear policy implicationsin the light of current political moves toremove peacelines. There is little doubt thatthe barriers are a profound obstacle to socialand economic progress in Northern Ireland.However, debates around their removal needto be based on a closer reading of the spatialand temporal evidence which suggests thatcontrary to the current consensus, they didnot act as the primary arenas in which peopledied during the conflict. It may well be thatpeacelines merely deflected patterns offatality to deeper within the sanctuaries butthis is clearly an area that requires furtherresearch.

These findings will shortly be published inPolitical Geography. See: Niall Cunningham &Ian Gregory, ‘Hard to miss, easy to blame?Peacelines, interfaces and political deathsduring the Belfast Troubles’, PoliticalGeography (in press).

For further information contact:niall.cunningham@manchester.ac.uk

The Falls-Shankill peaceline at Cupar Way.Photograph by Martin Melaugh, reproduced bykind permission of CAIN ©(www.cain.ulster.ac.uk)

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CRESC News Issue 18 March 2014

In a so-called 'post-colonial' era, how do thecontours of its violent encounters set limitsto what can be created for the future? And

how might those contours be changing?These are the questions being explored in anew project with seed-funding from CRESC.The aim is to understand 'post-colonial'relational imbroglios and find better ways ofthinking about the possible interventions ofanthropologists and social scientists in suchcomplex mosaic situations.

The small city of São Gabriel de Cachoeira inthe north of the Brazilian Amazon sits at theconvergence of two rivers, the Uaupés andthe Negro. The region is known as the AltoRio Negro, and is home to 17 differentAmerindian ethnicities and 23 languages.Despite the heterogeneity, the myriaddifferent groups maintain relations with oneanother through marriage and exchange ofgoods and beautifully crafted ceremonialitems. In October last year, I spent 2 monthsin São Gabriel, conducting preliminaryresearch into how Western scientificknowledge and practices relate to andinteract with those of the indigenousAmerindians.

Such relations are both implicit and explicit,and widespread. For example, as indigenouseducation systems are created in the region,the relationships between Western andAmerindian knowledges are being carefullyexplored; whereas when natural scientificresearchers arrive in the region to conductresearch, this relationship has until recentlybeen relatively taken for granted. During thesix weeks I spent in São Gabriel, I spoke to adiverse collection of people from verydifferent worlds: indigenous intellectuals,indigenous researchers, NGO workers,scientists, park rangers, indigenouspoliticians, indigenous teachers, doctors,missionaries, and kumua or shamans. Iwanted to understand how relations betweenthese very different worlds are being forged,broken, and re-forged, in everyday life in theregion, and what that means for the waysthat those worlds are changing.

Although the project focuses on theserelations as they are understood and livedtoday, we cannot understand what ishappening now without taking into account

the long and often violent history of contactwith the brancos, or “whites”.Anthropologist Christine Lasmar describeshow in the 17th century indigenous peoplewere captured and sold into slavery byPortuguese colonizers, and suffered terriblyduring a series of epidemics that sweptthrough the region as a result of this firstcontact. In the 19th century, merchantsarrived in the region, attracted by thepossibility of exchanging market goods forforest resources such as rubber, enslavingentire families in a brutal peonage system.

However, what lingers most painfully in thememories of the Amerindian people I spoketo is the arrival of Salesian missionaries inthe 20th century. The missionaries declaredthat they would save the indigenous peoplefrom the exploitation of the merchants;they brought with them ‘healthcare’ and‘education’ and, of course, Christianity. Theyordered that the ceremonial houses, ormalocas, be torn down so that they couldbuild ‘nuclear family’ houses; prohibited themale initiation rites and the use ofadornments; and drove away the powerfulshamans. The school was a central aspect ofthis domination, and the missionariescreated a generation of young indigenousreligious educators, recruited from theirvillages at 6 or 7 years old and sent to studyat the mission schools. There they livedunder a regime of rigid discipline, and were

forbidden fromspeaking theirnative languages.This has left alasting effect onthe elder membersof the indigenouscommunities,many of whomwent to missionschools.

As the control ofthe Salesianmissionarieswaned in the1980s, anindigenouspoliticalmovement was

gaining momentum, and in 1987, theFederation of Indigenous Organizations of theAlto Rio Negro (FOIRN) was created to fightfor indigenous territory rights – with thesupport of a Brazilian NGO called theInstituto Socio-Ambiental (ISA), and severalprominent Brazilian anthropologists. Thisthey achieved in 1996, when the Braziliangovernment granted permanent ownershipof 5 indigenous territories, with a total areaof 100,000 km2. Indigenous education inrecent years has become a main focus forindigenous intellectuals and politicians notonly as a way to equip people to deal with thebrancos, but also as a means of “revitalizing”(revitalizar) their culture, which they fear isbeing lost forever. The people of the Alto RioNegro are therefore turning to such efforts atso-called “inter-cultural dialogue” as anecessary means to protect themselves andwhat they hold dear.

The research is just beginning, and thereforefar from conclusive. But understanding theequivocations, convergences, overlaps andmisunderstandings between Western scienceand indigenous knowledges as this dialoguedevelops is clearly crucial for indigenous‘living well’, or bem viver. It is also, however,vital for understanding how Westernknowledge itself is being transformedthrough such relational entanglements, andwhat that might mean for futureengagement in the region.

Unpacking Post-colonialRelational Entanglementsin the Brazilian AmazonAntonia Walford

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CRESC News Issue 18 March 2014

Claire Hyde

Claire Hyde joins us as CRESC’s new CentreAdministrator from the Centre forConstruction Innovation (CCI) at theUniversity of Salford where she worked asthe Office Manager/Project Manager for oversix years.  As well as managing theoperations for the Centre, Claire was alsoresponsible for coordinating ERDF fundedprojects and was integral in the organisationof the closure of CCI with the conclusion ofthe Centre’s funding.

Claire’s main priorities whilst at CRESC will bethe preparation of the 2014 conference andshe will also draw upon her experience inassisting with the completion of CRESC, whilesupporting our on-going research initiatives.

Domenico Di Siena

Domenico Di Siena is an architecture andurban planning researcher and PhDcandidate from the Technical University ofMadrid, Urban and Regional PlanningDepartment. His research interests spanconcepts such as the Shareable City,Commons, Social Innovation, CollaborativeCulture, New Media, Collective Intelligence,Open Innovation, Sharing Economy andNetwork Thinking. At CRESC he is usingthese concepts to study how localcommunities mediate the interactionbetween digital technologies and space.

Prior to his research career Domenico was amember of the Ecosistema Urbano, aSpanish architecture firm, from 2008 to2011. He was also a consultant in 2011 forthe ConectaDEL program of the Inter-American Development Bank and is apartner at Cercamia, an IT startuppromoting a new alternative currency inSpain.

Camilla Lewis

I joined CRESC in January as a ResearchAssociate on the Big Data and Urban WasteManagement project. For this project, I amcarrying out ethnographic research with theGreater Manchester Waste DisposalAuthority. In collaboration with the authority,I am exploring the ways in which data ishandled and utilised at different stages of thewaste management process. The research Ihave undertaken so far has been enormouslyvaried. It has involved carrying out interviewswith data analysts and also spending time onthe bin wagons, observing how waste iscollected and disposed. The subjects of bigdata and waste are new areas of interest tome, but I am enjoying building on myexperiences of carrying out ethnographic inthe city. In 2013 I completed a PhD in theanthropology department at the University ofManchester. My thesis was an ethnographyof East Manchester, an area of the city whichhas undergone repeated waves of urbanredevelopment. My research explored long-standing residents’ responses to urbanchange and focused in particular on thethemes of community and social class. I amgreatly enjoying the opportunity of workwithin a team of researchers at CRESC andam looking forward to reporting my findingsback to the larger research team on the‘Socialising Big Data’ project.

Welcome!New recruits at CRESC...

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As well as managing the operations for the Centre, Claire was also r

PhD candidate from the T

As well as managing the operations for the Centre, Claire was also r

PhD candidate from the T

CRESC News Issue 18 March 2014

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What is social and cultural change? How are the public agendas for framing change set? What do they conceal?How do they reproduce inequalities? And how might they be contested? These are the core questions for the2014 CRESC Conference.

‘Epochal’ theorising will not do. Structures are real, but the extent to which they reflect simple patterns islimited. Instead we need to ask well-theorised and ambitious questions about particular institutions, networksand practices and their changing intersections with power and inequalities. In the final CRESC conference we areseeking theoretically informed and empirically-grounded contributions that explore change, power andinequality, ask how these are framed, and explore how dominant framings might be contested. We invite well-theorised empirical submissions in any area including the following:

Wednesday September 3, 2014 - Friday September 5, 2014, Friends Meeting House, Mount Street, Manchester

Annual Conference, 2014:Power, Culture and Social Framing

• Finance and the economyWhat kinds of mechanisms sustain thepower of business elites? How do thesework? How can we reveal the undisclosedthat sustains financial and businesspower? And how can we reframe issues inways that allow public discussion ofalternatives?

• National culture and ‘soft power’Technical change, privatisation andtransnationalism are changing thecharacter of national ‘soft power’, butwhat mechanisms are at work in thistransformation? How do they hardeninequalities, nationalisms and racisms?And where are the possible sites ofresistance?

• CitiesCultures and social divisions grow out of the power-saturatedmaterial realities of the city, but how do these processeswork? What tools do we need to understand theinterrelations between urban cultures and materials? Andhow might we open up spaces to alternatives?

• InfrastructuresInfrastructures reflect state decentralisation andfragmentation, but what are the material politics in play?How does power circulate between political, business andcultural elites, experts, and diverse publics? How might weexplore and reframe the shifting character of political power?

• ParticipationThe idea of ‘participation’ includes some and excludes others,so how and where are boundaries drawn, and who or what isbeing counted in or out? How do policy models frame theirquestions in ways that obscure exclusion and inequality?What assumptions do they depend on and how mightalternatives be articulated?

• ClassSocial stratification has an important cultural dimension, sowhat tools do we need to understand this? How do culturaldistinctions re-articulate and obscure power and classinequalities? And how do processes of cultural stratificationoperate in the life course and between generations?

For further details please visit:http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/annual-conference-2014-power-culture-and-social-framing