In the previous post, I set out the revised questions guiding the fellowship and shared some examples to illustrate the 'diagnostic' work of critique (i.e., pointing out what is problematic about current ways of thinking and working, and why they persist). The take-home message is that across the study sectors (early years, youth justice, housing, and health), there's been extensive learning about what hasn't been working well. What's especially interesting about the critiques is that they very often point to similar issues both in terms of the internal 'mechanics' of the different organisations and services (i.e., why they operate in the ways that they do), and the thinking or ideas that ultimately underpin them. Through this exercise, I've also developed a greater appreciation for how people working across sectors resist and push back against dominant influences, and in doing so create space to come at issues differently. This final post of the set relates to questions 4 and 5 of the revised framework (what are the alternatives that people offer up, and how can they be realised) and reflects on some of the challenges that come with this aspect of the project. It is still a work in progress and will be further developed through discussions with influential actors across the cases. Please do share with me any thoughts you have on these updates (n.mcmahon1@lancaster.ac.uk), or indeed any suggestions for people that I should be speaking to!
Searching for alternatives
The original plan for the fellowship was to look at how dominant and competing causal stories around inequalities play out across different sectors. However, I quickly realised the limits of this approach, and the need to be more open-minded about the kinds of ideas or intellectual resources that are advanced to reshape thinking and action. This has broadened the inquiry and raises questions about how best to search for alternatives and where they are most likely to emerge.
One thing that I've learned from analysing academic critiques is that the focus tends to be on providing a detailed account of what is not working well, with alternatives getting only a cursory mention towards the end of an article. So while they provide useful examples, it will be important to source additional resources that provide more worked-up accounts of key ideas.
I've also realised (yet again) that I was employing a fairly blinkered approach at the outset of the work by naïvely privileging academic outputs as the most likely source of alternatives. But of course many of the most radical, ambitious, and subversive insights and ideas will have come out of the lived experiences of fighting injustice and campaigning for change, and these insights will take a range of forms and formats that need to be considered.
Generating meaningful comparisons
While the aspiration of producing a 'helicopter view' of alternatives across the different cases is appealing, it simply won't be possible to be exhaustive in this work. As such, there are further challenges in figuring out how best to identify a subset of texts or examples to include in the analysis, and how to generate meaningful comparisons across the cases. One potential way of doing this is to look specifically at the 'work' that alternatives are designed to do in terms of countering the effects of dominant ways of thinking and working. A couple of examples to illustrate what I mean are presented below.
If the tendency is for individuals or social groups to be considered 'the problem' that requires studying and explaining, then a corrective to this default setting could be a social harm perspective [1]. Social harm emerged as an idea within the field of criminology, and is designed overcome the limits of studying only those actions that meet the formal definition of 'crime'. It aims to redirect attention to the various harms that people are subjected to, either through intent or, as is often the case, through failures to act. Importantly, in the context of considering inequalities, a social harm perspective can illuminate stark differences in what harms seem to be tolerated, and for whom.
Likewise, if the tendency is for individuals and communities to be viewed through a 'risk management' lens, then a corrective to this default setting could be adopting a capabilities approach [2]. The idea of capabilities moves away from seeing people only in terms of what they are perceived to be lacking, to instead appreciate the range of assets and strengths they possess as individuals and as part of communities. It also challenges organisations to get beyond overly simplistic explanations for unequal outcomes, and develop a much deeper understanding of the realities of people's lives and how possibility and opportunity can be created within those. Other exemplar approaches that crop up across the cases and are designed to overcome shortcomings in traditional ways of thinking and working include those that are: rights-based, participatory, trauma-informed, guided by lived experience and an ethos of care, democratic, co-operative, and oriented towards complexity and whole systems thinking. These examples are not mutually exclusive and I'm sure many more are coming to mind for you.
Questions to consider
As I gain familiarity with the alternatives advanced across the cases, there are some questions that keep coming up for me and that reflect the original motivation for the research. This project was about gaining a deeper understanding of how the ambition of moving beyond symptoms to address the 'root causes' of inequalities plays out in sectors beyond health, and the stories or ideas used to stimulate this reorientation of effort.
Consequently, the first set of questions relate to the nature of change that follows from alternative ideas and approaches, and whether it is possible, and appropriate, to categorise these. As ever, I've struggled with some of the inconsistency and obscure use of language across the cases. For example, while some alternatives might be radically different from what has been happening to date, are they 'radical' in the sense of getting at the so-called 'roots' of an issue? Likewise, some actions might be transformative in that individual lives have been changed beyond recognition, but are they transforming socioeconomic conditions and processes? And to what extent do alternatives have a political project? Are they looking solely to offset the worst harms of a system that creates inequality and precarity, or is the end game about mobilising efforts to change that system? And how meaningful is it to make these kinds of distinctions, or is it just imposing an unhelpful (and ideologically polarising) binary onto work that is much more nuanced and complex?
The second set of questions relate to how deep alternatives go in terms of disrupting institutional mechanics and root thinking. What has been the experience of trying to realise alternatives within different policy and practice settings? How often is it the case that new language is adopted, but the essence of the thinking and working stays broadly the same? If alternatives are genuinely disruptive to dominant ideals and ways of working, do they get a hearing within mainstream institutions? And if they do, to what extent do they find themselves detached from their critical origins and 'repackaged' to fit with more readily accepted ideas [3]. Finally, to what extent can any of this be considered intentional? I really value the above image because I think it speaks to the experience of eagerly trying to 'get out of the box' and come at issues in new ways, but all the while still constrained by often unrecognised assumptions and ideals that limit what can be changed and what is ultimately perceived to be possible. These are the kinds of questions that I will be mulling over between now and the end of the fellowship. I'll continue to share updates as the insights from this next stage of the research take shape.
[Note: This is the final post in a set of three]
Acknowledgements
Thankfully, I am not muddling through this project alone! Please have a look at this page which gives more information and due credit to the advisory group whose experience and reflections are also shaping the work.
Some references
[1] Hillyard, P., & Tombs, S. (2007). From ‘crime’ to social harm?. Crime, Law and Social Change, 48, 9-25.
[2] Cottam, H. (2018). Radical help: How we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state. Hachette UK.
[3] Liberty (2023). Holding Our Own: A guide to non-policing solutions to serious youth violence. https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/HoldingOurOwn_Digital-DoubleSpreads.pdf