Dr Hannah Jones
Amy Hinterberger (University of Warwick)
,
entitled '"Go
Home": Mapping the unfolding controversy of Home Office Immigration
Campaigns',
working with colleagues at six
other universities across the UK. Hannah is also writing up research
with colleagues
from the ‘Living Multiculture’
ESRC project based at the Open
University on everyday multiculture; and with colleagues from COMPAS,
University of Oxford from the EU Integration Fund AMICALL
project
on local government
practices to improve attitudes to migrants.
She worked in
London local government before completing her PhD in
the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. She also
holds
degrees in Human Sciences (University of Oxford) and Policy Studies
(University
of Edinburgh). She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for
Public
Knowledge, New York University; a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in the
Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London; a Research
Associate
at the Centre for Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford;
and a
Research Associate in the Department of Social Policy and Criminology,
The Open
University. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
This year the Department of Sociology at the University of
Warwick organized an exciting and lively research seminar series. The
conveners, Amy Hinterberger and John Solomos, sought out a range of
speakers
known for their empirically robust and conceptually innovative research
in the
UK and internationally. Speakers featured in the series such as Suzanne
Hall
(LSE), Jennifer Curtis (Missouri) and Nisha Kapoor (York) asked
pressing
questions about the changing landscape of contemporary social research.
What
are the lived realities of allegiance, participation and belonging from
the
base of a multi-ethnic street in south London? Is love a human right?
What can
be said of the state of race, or more specifically about the nature of
the
contemporary state which has declared racism is a relic?
In order to celebrate the arrival of seven new
members of
staff to the Department the seminar series also featured the work of
new
members of Department. This paper features an interview on the research
and
current work of Hannah Jones, who delivered a research seminar entitled
‘Uncomfortable positions in local government: negotiating
cohesion, inequality
and change’, based on her
monograph which has been shortlisted for the British Sociological
Association
Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2014. The seminar addressed
inequalities of
power and discrimination at the local government level in the UK.
Hannah
recently joined the Department in October 2013 as an Assistant
Professor having
previously worked as a Research Associate at the Open University.
‘@uncomfy’ is the twitter handle
chosen by Jones. The second
part of her twitter handle: ‘sociologist at large’ points
to how her research
on urgent social matters brings to the fore the contemporary politics
of
multiculture in Britain. But how is this ‘uncomfy’, or
uncomfortable? In Jones’
new book she examines how local government officers and politicians
negotiate
issues like community cohesion policy, diversity, inequality,
discrimination,
class, power and change. This kind of work, she argues, necessitates
some
'uncomfortable positions' when managing ethical, professional and
political
commitments. This includes negotiating aspects of racial and ethnic
inclusion
in the workplace, as well as examining how the expression of local
residents,
such as those in the London Borough of Hackney, can be in tension with
local
government policy and programs.
***
AH: In
your new book, Negotiating cohesion, inequality and change:
Uncomfortable positions in local government
(Policy Press 2013) you explore how multiculturalism, inequality
and
belonging are understood in the day-to-day thinking and practices of
local
government. Why is it important to study local government in this way?
HJ: Well I think
it’s to do with understanding how local government operates
behind the scenes,
a lot of the thinking around government focuses on national level, or
international level in terms of talking to policy makers. But from my
experience of working in local government as well I knew that
it’s not enough
to just treat local government as implementers of national policy.
What’s
written down in policy documents doesn’t tell you very much about
the
negotiations that go on, and how people produce those documents as
tools, and
manage their intentions, commitments and so on around that. I think
it’s
important to look at the people who make up government and how they
operate,
not necessarily in order to sympathise with them or to humanize the
institutions, but because if you want to make progressive change, or to
influence how society works, it is important to first understand how it
works.
Telling policy people that their documents are vague or can be
critiqued isn’t
going to make much difference if they already know that; the question
is, why
and how does government function, and where are the ways it might then
be
influenced?
AH: Your seminar
really illuminated this kind of ethnographic sensibility about studying
local
government. Another aspect of your research seminar that I really liked
was how
you bring attention to the politics of emotion and feeling to an arena
which is
often associated with trash collection and other mundane practices.
HJ: I think part
of the work of understanding these institutions is understanding how
people
operate. There’s been a growing attention to emotion as a tool of
management in
policy and in government – for example, in behavioural economics
– and
generally across sociology and the social sciences around the
‘affective turn’.
Often the social science looks at the language of policy, which does
often have
a strong emotional and affective component. But what I’m
particularly
interested in is understanding how people operate and get other people
to do
things, persuade one another, justify their own actions – and
often this is
about feeling, connected to ‘rational’ thinking. There are
emotional reactions
to things like trash collection too, which can be important in making
people
feel like they live in a place that is well run, welcoming, where
people are
treated with respect. But it’s much harder to measure how people
feel about the
trash collection that it is to know whether the bins were collected on
time or
not.
AH: The Sociology
Department at Warwick has a longstanding reputation as an intellectual
gateway
for research engagement at a regional, national and international
level. Your
work is especially attuned to these concerns.
HJ: Yes, I’m
interested in engagement and in using research that relates to
different
geographical levels. I think it’s important to recognize that
looking at the
local level also connects to regional, national and international
forces and
concerns. Not just because these processes might also occur in other
contexts,
but because they are all interconnected, they’re all relational.
The kinds of
concerns that emerge at a local level, say at the moment around
austerity, the
cuts, migration, attitudes to belonging, are all intimately linked to
national
and international processes and policies. So recognizing that, you can
see
global forces in the local are really important, as well as considering
whether
and how local interactions can add up to and affect things at a greater
geographical scale.
I’ve been working on an edited book with
Emma Jackson (who
is in Urban Studies at Glasgow University) which deliberately gathers
chapters
focused on local belonging of migrants and pays attention to how this
connects
to transnational flows of power and feeling (Stories of Cosmopolitan
Belonging:
Emotion and Location, Routledge/Earthscan, forthcoming 2014). And I
think it’s
really good to be at Warwick where we have those national and
international
connections, and I’m really keen to stretch that out to think
about how we can
link that to the micro scale too.
***
So while her twitter handle might be pithy, the
work that it
encompasses is far reaching and promises to have significant impact on
policy
and planning in urban areas of Britain. And it’s within this
focus on local
government, belonging, transnational flows of power and feeling that
larger
intersections with the traditions of research that have been carried
out by sociologists
at Warwick become illuminated.
***
AH: Speaking of
engagement at a national level you were recently awarded one of the
first ESRC
Urgent Grant Scheme awards which enables researchers to respond to
unforeseen
incidents. One of the significant aspects of this scheme is that it
helps
researchers like you respond rapidly to unexpected and transient events
in
society. So can you tell me what urgent
event triggered this project?
HJ: That project
is about the local, national and the international in some of the ways
we were
just discussing. If you remember in the summer of 2013, there was a
sudden
surge in Home Office publicity around migration, there was a very high
profile
advertising van that drove around some London boroughs, with a sign
saying ‘In
the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest’. The Home Office was
saying that was
aimed at encouraging voluntary departures from migrants whose paperwork
wasn’t
in order. That got a lot of discussion in public debate. At the same
time the
Home Office did a lot of publicity around raids and arrests by
Immigration
Enforcement teams, including tweeting photographs with the hashtag
#immigrationoffender. The project is interested in what that means, how
that
kind of publicity from the government, from the Home Office, around
migration
enforcement is connecting to public debates both nationally and
locally, and
how those online publicity networks that were being used, as well as
in-person
networks, connect to activism. Because those interventions by the Home
Office
did lead to quite a lot of oppositional activism in different ways. So
it was
clearly a moment when public debate was taking off and we were
interested in
following that controversy through.
We were granted the first Urgent Grant from the
ESRC partly
because we needed to collect this data immediately before it was lost,
and also
because our research design is about following through and engaging
with these
ongoing debates as they happen; we want our developing research
findings about
the local and national dynamics of public debate on this issue to
become part
of that debate themselves. We’ll have a local focus in 6 case
study areas, but
we’ll also have a national survey and track national debates.
These issues are
current in the UK at the moment, but also in other countries in Europe
and
across the world, so those patterns will be interesting to explore.
AH: So, it sounds
like engagement at regional and national levels is a really significant
part of
this work. What about in an international context?
HJ: Local,
regional and national scales operate within this work, and the
international
context comes in two ways. Partly because migration is obviously
international
and so there’s the context and how are those global flows
considered in the
publicity from the Home Office and reactions to them? But also because
this
process is something which seems to be mirrored in other countries too,
so in
the future, developing more research on this, it would be good to link
up with
looking at the experiences of these kind of publicity campaigns by
other
governments, and the reactions to them in other countries and other
contexts.
And how – I don’t know, but I suspect – that
different national politicians and
activists are influenced by debates in other countries. Added to that
we are
looking at online interactions and by their very nature they can have
transnational impacts and disseminations as well as national and
regional.
***
The department was founded in 1970 by John Rex who
is most
well-known for his studies of race and ethnic relations.
Writing in 1986, Rex reflected on the
discipline stating that "if we are not to become simply technocrats
researching on the means necessary to achieve Government ends and if we
are to
be able to maintain the independence necessary to look critically at
those
ends, we need to have a comparative perspective, and that perspective
is in
turn dependent upon the understanding of theoretical issues" (ix).
***
AH: It sounds
like you are committed to developing non-traditional collaborations and
are
keen to push the barriers of disciplinary activity. How do you approach
this in
your work?
HJ: In terms of
interdisciplinarity, just on this project we’re talking about,
I’m in Sociology
and other collaborators, such as Yasmin Gunaratnam (Goldsmiths), are in
Sociology Departments, but we’re also working with other
Co-Investigators in a
range of Departments including Urban Studies, Media, Life Sciences and
Education, and Applied Social Research. And we have project partners
such as
the Runnymede Trust and the Glasgow Refugee Asylum and Migration
Network. So
we’re kind of interested in the question at hand, rather than the
discipline in
particular; but always with a focus on some of the core concerns of
sociology,
around inequality, around understanding social processes by looking at
the
individual and the structural.
In terms of working with non-academics, I’m
interested in
research being connected to other users, and public sociology in the
best
sense, that is, research that is used by and engages with people beyond
academic journals. We’re in public institutions and we’re
publicly funded and
we do work that is for the public good, so maybe the public should have
something to do with that! On this project, we have partners from
national
organisations and will also be working with community researchers at a
local
level, and those groups have been informing the research questions,
focus and
design of the study from the start.
AH: How are these
goals of collaboration and engagement incorporated into your teaching?
HJ: That’s
interesting. I think in terms of my interests and ethos I hope
that’s always
there. As you know, we’re all developing new modules at the
moment to broaden
out the undergraduate and taught postgraduate options in the Sociology
Department at the moment, and one of the possible modules I’m
working on is a
specialist research methods module that would look at action research,
and
developing skills for connecting social theory and research methods to
work
with communities and organisations directly. That would include some
engagement
with community organisations as part of the curriculum. I’m also
interested in
developing more regular links with third sector organisations that
might
benefit from small research projects of the kind that dissertation
students
produce, where we could match student research interests to the needs
and
timescales of small (or larger!) organisations working directly on the
kinds of
social issues that are of interest to our Sociology students.
AH: The
Sociology Department is going through a
period of renewal and change – and your work adds a significant
aspect to these
new dynamics. How do you see it connected to other work in the
Department and
across Warwick?
HJ: I definitely
think it does fit into the history of the Department, and also the
future of it
as we grow and develop. As you know, the Department has a long
tradition of
groundbreaking work on race and ethnicity from John Rex (the founder)
onwards,
and my concerns around research fit into that. I’m also looking
at developing a
module that focuses on some of that, on Racism and Xenophobia, which
would use
some of the local, national and colonial archives that we hold at
Warwick in
the Modern Records Centre, but also looking into the future around how
concerns
change over time. Of course that course will be able to use some of the
work of
our eminent colleagues as key readings! I’m thinking particularly
of John
Solomos, Gurminder Bhambra and Goldie Osuri. Social justice has always
been a
question within the Department, and the majority of us are thinking
about work
that relates to social justice in different ways.
Other people within the Department are working on
engaged
sociology in exciting ways I’m learning from – Cath
Lambert, for instance,
whose empirical focus (for example on her current AHRC project,
‘The Value of
Live Art: experience, politics and affect’) is quite different to
mine, but
whose use of ‘live’, non-traditional methods to consider
how artistic practices
relate to sociological concerns has lots of parallels to explore. [She
is] also
developing teaching with Maria do MarPerreira through an
interdisciplinary
module on Gendered Knowledges which I think will include a placement in
local
community activism, as part of the teaching. Alice Mah’s work on
urban studies
and the work she’s just starting with Mick Carpenter on
Connecting Communities
is about looking at Coventry and its history and present, and again
that’s
about relating the past and future of social issues to one another, and
in the
process building on long-standing concerns and strengths of the
Department.
There is of course the very strong theory tradition within the
Department too,
for instance currently with people like Claire Blencowe, Steve Fuller,
and
Nicholas Gane, and I’m very pleased to be working in a Department
where the
connections between strong theoretical work and empirical research are
embedded. So I’m looking forward to being involved in all of that
and how we
develop some new and exciting work together!
***
In the best (re)inventions of Rex's sentiments,
Jones’ work
continues a rigorous analysis of political and social institutions, but
with
new creative twists that involve bringing attention to emotion as a
tool of
management in policy and in government. And indeed, as many people
living in
the UK can attest, a local government practice, such as trash
collection (or
the lack of it), often involves some strong emotions.
In the coming months
there will be more events and opportunities to engage with the research
activities in Sociology @ Warwick. For further information about event
and the
seminar series see: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/news/scd/2013-14/
References:
Jones, H. (2013) Negotiating
cohesion, inequality and change: Uncomfortable positions in local
government,
Bristol: Policy Press
Rex, J. & Mason, D., Eds. (1986) Theories
of Race and Ethnic Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Selected further
publications by Hannah Jones
Books and Book Chapters
(forthcoming
2014) [with Emma Jackson]
(eds) Stories of
Cosmopolitan Belonging: Emotion and
Location.
London:
Routledge/Earthscan. (in press)
(2013) 'Collaboration and Mutual Support in the
Third Sector'
in Marjorie Mayo, Zoraida Mendiwelso-Bendek and Carol Packham (eds)Community Research for
Community
Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
(2013)
[with Jones, V and Camilo Cock, J]
'Impact Measurement or Agenda-Setting?' in
Marjorie Mayo, Zoraida Mendiwelso-Bendek and Carol Packham (eds) Community Research for
Community
Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
(2012)
"Interview
with sociologist Hannah Jones by Ruth Ewan and students from George
Mitchell
School" in Ruth Ewan, Liberties
of the Savoy. London: Bookworks and CREATE London.
(2011)
"Negotiating community cohesion",
in Alexander, C and James, M (eds) New
Directions, New Voices, London: Runnymede Trust.
Research and policy reports
(2012)
Seeing the Difference: Measuring the Impact
of Small
Community Organisations. London: Goldsmiths,
University
of London.
(2012)
Attitudes
to
Migrants, Communication and Local Leadership: Country research report - United Kingdom. Oxford:
COMPAS.
(2011)
What makes hosting relationships work? How
large and
small organisations support each other in the third sector.
London: Locality.
(2010)
Sustainability
reporting matters: the state of sustainability reporting in the public
sector,
London: Association of Certified Chartered Accountants.