Subject: SSC Board of Studies
To: a.roberts@mdx.ac.uk
Organisation: Middlesex University
Dear Andrew
Thank you for making the SSC Board of Studies
available to our students
via the web.
I commend your continuing efforts to make
information relevant to students accessible to them. As always, SHE has
generated a very positive feedback from students. SHE1 and SHE2 continue to
provide models of excellence that contribute positively
to the student learning experience.
Please pass on my best wishes to SHE students and inform them that they
can contact me via email
with any
comments they have regarding SSC
modules. I look forward to hearing from students and responding to their
comments.
Chris Burford
Curriculum Leader Social Science
By Malcolm Richardson
A Brief CV
This is more or less what is in Sociology and Social Policy Handbooks
at Middlesex University.
Malcolm Richardson is a former electronics engineer, who completed his
undergraduate studies at Middlesex Polytechnic in 1983. This was
followed by part-time teaching at Middlesex, whilst studying for a Ph D
at London University, Institute of Education. Since gaining his Ph D in
1989, Malcolm has taught at Middlesex, mainly in the areas of sociology and
social policy. He is Module Leader for SOC3090 (Contemporary Social
Theory) and SPL3050 (Education & Social Policy), and Subject Advisor
for Sociology. Malcolm has contributed to debates on education policy,
history
of education, and educational research. His current research interests
include education, training and employment, and attempting to navigating
some of the 'outer reaches' of contemporary, social theory without
drowning!
Things you never wanted to know about
Andrew Roberts
Potty biography one
Andrew Roberts was born in London during the final air raids of the
second world war. He went to Billericay Secondary School, Essex where
progressive teachers encouraged him to write essays even though he could
not spell. His essays had very long sentences with lots of brackets. One
day the English master explained that there were several types of
[{(bracket)}] and, for many years thereafter, Andrew's essays became very
complicated to read - So only Andrew read them, and he wrote them for
himself.
In the nineteen sixties he worked in a school science laboratory, and
then sold paperbacks on Dorset beaches, as the world caught up with him and
grew its hair long. He was married to
Valerie
(now dead), who had a much
better imagination than he has, and more and better hair. Their daughter,
Ruth [Lily], has three children, Michael, Lisa and Danny, [and one
grandchild, Charlie].
Andrew scraped through a Geography A level with help from his old
school, and then took Economics by mail order. He was admitted to Enfield
College of Technology (now the Enfield Campus of Middlesex University) in
1969 to study social science. Enfield then was a boiling pot of trouble
where engineers, technologists, sociologists, novel readers, psychologists,
economists, geographers, gas-fitters, mathematicians, linguists, computer-
ists, philosophers, historians, planners, criminals, social workers,
politicians and criminologists, all tried to look at the same
world with different theories.
In 1973 Andrew was one of the people who started the Mental Patients
Union. He lived with this, and its consequences, for most of the 1970s. In
the 1980s he ran courses on community care, (and one on political
philosophy), for Hackney Workers Educational Association. He now teaches,
at Middlesex University, where he has worked hard at making his style of
writing less complicated, so that students can understand him.
The rest of the world had a hair cut a long while ago.
Potty biography two
Andrew Roberts: Born 1944 in a London hospital that was being bombed.
One of the first group of eleven plus failures to take O levels at
Billericay Secondary Modern School. Passionate about Jayne Eyre. He
could not survive Grammar School, but learnt how much he needed to
love whatever he did. Bookseller from sixteen, with a break for
chemistry. Psychiatric patient from nineteen. Husband of Valerie
Argent from twenty-one. A Quaker [April 1968 to March 2013]. Met William
Blake. He studied
Social Science at Enfield College of Technology. Another breakdown.
He and Valerie helped found the Mental Patient's Union in 1973.
Another breakdown. Studied and taught in Hackney Workers Educational
Association. Helped start "Hamhp" - with and for people with learning
disabilities (1982). Became a Middlesex University lecturer, teaching
the history of social science. Valerie died 26.9.1991. In April 1999,
Andrew started his website [now at
http://studymore.org.uk], which
includes his "History of Social Science for Budding Theorists" and
his "ABC Study Guide to University Education in Plain English". The
"Mental Health History Timeline" aims to be objective history, but
uses scraps of subjective insight, from patients and others,
collected over many years. With Susan Tyler Hitchcock, he recently
created a web biography of Mary and Charles Lamb. (Prompted by
Valerie Argent's 1980 discovery of Mary's name in the register of a
London madhouse). He is now working with Betty Falkenberg on a web
biography of Charlotte Mew (1869-1927). On Friday 13.8.2004 he
finished a thesis on the Victorian Lunacy Commission that took him
thirty-one years. A great-grandfather.
By Lynn Scheneider
All Saints Bookshop
-
What a place!
They try to cater for all your taste.
They are friendly, helpful -
- and sometimes jolly too.
They try to do their best for you.
They hold your new books for just one week.
They sell your old books too.
Just ask them if there's anything else that they could do for you.
They don't take plastic for their packs -
- but that's another story.
The
ABC Study Guide
is the best book yet.
So, buy that and you won't be sorry.
By Tom Wengraf
A Pen Picture
Tom Wengraf thinks that you can only understand individual lives if you
locate them in the development of the world economy and that the meaning of
the changes in the world economy and of the struggle of social movements
needs to be understood in terms of individual lives.
He thinks that theorising is something everybody does and that, if you
think you aren't, you are letting yourself be programmed by somebody else
and the theory they want you to accept. But he also thinks you have to put
your theory to work in action-oriented research, if you want it to be
alive.
He is the chair of the London group of the Friends of Le Monde
Diplomatique which he thinks is the only serious international monthly
struggling for democratisation, and is angry that it is so difficult to get
hold of the English-language edition.
He has supported students researching student experience of modules at
Middlesex. He is a specialist on qualitative research methodology. He
thinks that most social science/sociology is not focused enough on depth
understanding of our own lives nor upon an understanding of struggles over
the shape of the world ecology and political economy as affected by
struggles between the world financial rulers and movements of citizens
struggling to get more control of market and power processes. He thinks
that you have to understand global struggles and changes to act locally in
the here and now to influence them. He is particularly interested in depth-
interviewing as a way of exploring individual and collective lives and runs
undergraduate and postgraduate modules in this subject.
A book edited by P. Chamberlayne, J. Bornat and T.Wengraf called The
Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science will be published around
Easter 2000. A textbook by him on Narrative and Semi-Structured Depth
Interviewing exists in a Middlesex edition for students doing his modules
and should be published by Sage when he has time to polish it up properly.
The Social Context of Electronic Education
Currently, all the professions are being deskilled largely
and reskilled slightly in order to replace living labour
(people) by dead labour. This includes 'mass universities'
like Middlesex with a very high relative ratio of students
to staff and a large number of casual and casualised staff.
For academic staff, this means increasing number of students
who have less and less contact with a given member of staff;
it means their increasing subordination to the electronic
courses which they have to 'deliver' and 'administer'. This
is going hand-in-hand with the opening-up of public services
to commercial multinationals, so that all non-commercial
activities (as education was for a while, along with health,
etc) can be remade as commercial ones and maintain the
otherwise declining rate of capitalist profit. The result is
that the pluralism of individual teaching is being replaced
by edu-businesses where most individual members of staff are
required to administer modules they have not devised. The
World Trade Organisation is given the task of breaking open
the areas of health and welfare and education at an
international level to enable giant corporations (mostly US)
to remake world cultures in their own image, tailored for
particular national markets in the same way that chains of
hotels are given totally bogus local colour.
SHE (Society, History and Environment) is a small local competitor, using
input from local Middlesex staff, to try to create a space for such staff
to form a 'peasants' cooperative' which might for a while prevent Walt
Disney edutainment (read Giddens on US textbook giants) from winning the
market for a while. I support it. It has a number of features which make it
progressive in many ways.
However, unless staff and students realise the global
context in which the struggle for corporate domination of
cultural and educational production is being fought, they
may give the wrong impression about the global processes and
struggles which are going on. 'Seattle' made the hitherto
pretty unseen hand of corporate global capitalism visible
because it messed up; it also showed that under some
conditions -- when world ruling elites have not quite got
their internal contradictions sorted out, mass action of an
imaginative sort can have an effect. Students have already
been largely won over to the notion of themselves as
'consumers' and to electronic anything as simple
technological progress, which is simply progress without
qualifications. The elimination of expensive face-to-face
contact between students and students and between students
and frontline staff is part of the 'consumer privatisation'
strategy, which helps to undermine old micro-despotisms,
yes, but also prevents local solidarities based on genuine
inter-personal knowledge from forming.
In some US schools, teaching is done on computers, and the
computers all have compulsory advertising on them. The
'educational programmes' are provided by giant 'scholastic'
publishers. Their grasp of the notion of critique is roughly
the same as that of the 'Readers Digest'!
A sociology of neo-liberal globalisation -- and the
struggles against it, against the World Trade Organisation,
the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank and the
Washington concensus -- would clarify the local processes at
Middlesex as being only understandable in the world context
of the struggle of multinationals to find sources of post-
industrial profit in the human service sectors currently not
technologically or legally subordinated fully (as yet) to
corporate profit imperatives and a unified economistic
perspective, because the fight against such subordination
continues all over the world and at all sorts of levels.
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