Hannah Nicklin

Higher Education – an Alternative.

An image from the protests the day the tripling of university fees and effective privatisation of higher education was passed.

Always seem to find myself blogging on Christmas Eve, and it does tend to be a slightly political one. A combination of panic over not hitting my 4-a-month pseudo target to provoke the blog, and of looking forward to a whole new year to shuffle bigger ideas into my head. I haven’t done very much talking about politics over here recently though, and I think that has something to do with feeling completely overwhelmed at the sheer amount of thoughtless, incredibly damaging and regressive policy that a government can propose and pass in such a short amount of time. But I suspect that front-loading this shift to a severe right wing agenda is entirely meant to wrong-foot opposition – both in terms of mainstream political opposition (still reforming) and  what I guess I might term ‘social’ opposition (i.e. of wider society, protest, resistance, occupation). Who on earth has the energy to oppose each ignorant and hurtful piece of policy? And while single-interest organisations and movements are probably the best way to aim energy at each attack, this prevents energy mounting behind a universal resistance. Heads they win, tails you lose.

And I could concentrate on and deconstruct some particular attacks; on women, on children, on the disabled or education, but there are people doing this stronger and more thoroughly than I have the energy to do. And actually we all need moments of throwing energy at non-negative things, don’t we? Ideas of our own, not formed in direct opposition to others’. So I’m going to talk about something briefly here, inelegantly and slightly outrageous, but importantly about change-for-the-better , not stopping change-for-the-worse. It is borne of the resistance that I have been involved in the most – the privatisation of our higher education system (it is nothing less, and so not about tuition fees foremost) – and also as an academic, lecturer, and student, an area which I daily encounter. And finally it hopefully faces the ‘you’re just protesting against, not offering an alternative/it’s just the same as a graduate tax’ criticisms.

This is cobbled together from a couple of comment posts and is still fragmented. But it’s Christmas Eve, gimme a break.

Most people agree the problem with funding higher education is that by raising the bar in attendance (albeit for reasonable aims – and I think I stick by Labour on this – beforehand the wrong 10% were going) to 50% or so, there are just too many people to fund all of them (to a degree that is palatable to current UK mainstream politics at least), and it results in a surplus of people educated to degree level, leading to the farcical situation where you need a degree for an entry level admin job in any of the big desirable professions – media, PR, the creative industries, engineering, etc.

We also need a revision of the education system inline with the needs of the country. What is the biggest problem? In a society with what is considered a ‘surplus’ of uni-educated people, NEETs – those Not in Education Employment or Training – often young, often from the least advantaged backgrounds – the kind of people for whom  EMA and FE make all the difference -  they are completely lost to this system.

We should also admit that some people want to pursue education for its own sake – but also some people want a job, and that’s why they go to uni. And that, finally, greater employment, better research, a more educated populace, people better at and more happier with their jobs – these are things a country should invest in. Not only because they pay back dividends. This final point is a left-wing ideological stance and I make no apology for that, but the idea below also outlines aspects of meritocratic ideas that the right-wing claim to aspire to, too.

So higher education, how do you fix it?

Continue reading…

Arts Cuts: the verdict.

Image shared by Articulate Matter on Flickr via a Creative Commons License

So you may have seen the http://supportthearts.co.uk site that I set up in the run up to the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). It was developed in response to my and others’ disappointment with the approach of other campaigns that only approached one side of the debate, and often in an alienating way. Well the Review has passed, and the repercussions of the announced cuts are beginning to emerge. I was asked by Arts Professional to comment on them, and I thought it was worth reproducing my responses here.

What impact will the cuts to ACE and the DCMS have on the arts infrastructure?

I think that two things are going to suffer most in the light of 29% cuts to ACE, nearly 25% to local government and 100% to non STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) teaching in Higher Education; firstly regional and community theatre – much regional and community theatre relies on investment from local authorities, which facing massive job losses and the pressure to privatise their services will be hard pressed to see the arts as an investment. And secondly: innovation and education; Churchill famously said “without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” Cuts to the higher education system and a subsidised arts sector stripped to the bone and forced to rely on private investment will get us both coming and going.

What’s your worst fear, your highest hope, and the scenario(s) you think is/are most likely?

My worst fear within the industry is the fetishisation of the 80s ethic. Many people who found the turn towards box-ticking repellant seem to hold up the days of living on a shoe-string, making urgent, simple pieces – generally whilst living on the dole – as a paragon of creativity. This is not to say that shoe-string work isn’t valuable, but art and artists are; as a country we should acknowledge that. We also need to acknowledge how such a fiscal environment mean people with caring responsibilities (often women), or from underprivileged backgrounds, find themselves unable to consider making art – we can’t afford to lose those voices.

My greatest hope is that the industry stands tall and we challenge ACE and the community to revise how it thinks about funding art. Just as in the greatest period of national debt the big idea of the welfare state was born – I believe the arts need to think big ideas about how and what we fund. Bureaucracy has its place, but we need to tackle the perception (or reality) that box ticking gets you funding – how people are assessed – how many 100% funding is offered to new innovative work, work with RFOs to work out how best to absorb their cuts and assess them, shift focus to compensate for the greater losses of the regions, move away from the big buildings (the RSC, the ROH and the National could well consider getting their budgets from Tourism) look at digital technology as a cheaper way of doing certain things, and create a nationwise community of mutual assets – space, and expertise – to fill as many gaps as possible. We also need to look into measuring the impact of disinvestment in the arts on the economy and society. Dealing in hard facts is repugnant to some, but they don’t half help when lobbying politicians. The most important thing is to keep art alive (and in all the UK) so that as we lobby and state our case we have something to take forward – not a corpse to resuscitate. Continue reading…

TaPRA Murmurings…

Image shared by delgaudm on flickr via a creative commons license.

I’ve just returned from the TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) annual conference in Cardiff. I was there part of the Theatre and Philosophy Working Group, and delivered a joint paper with my supervisor Dan Watt. The first half of the session was a soundwalk I made which can be heard over here and the second half two papers that converged. This was my half of the paper. We wanted to provoke discussion on the growing irrelevancies of the ‘broadcasting’ conference form, in age that is more like a network, as well as its ability to interrogate performance. We didn’t aim to provide solutions, but offer a provocation. Following the main part of the conference the working group began to plan an interim event more like a symposium crashed together with game play, both performative and academic… Read on for more on the provocation

A Paper without Organs, or, Detours in Theatre and Thinking

‘We are in the era of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the scattered. We exist in a moment when the world is experiencing, I believe, something less like a great life that would develop through time than like a network that connects points and weaves its skin’ (Foucoult, The Essential Works II, 175) (West-Pavlov 2009, 18)

Christopher Sandberg (2004) […] calls for a different audience theory […] He asserts that in order to fully understand and appreciate a larp [live action role playing game], one must participate in it. This creates a sort of first person audience” (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 54)

Subtlemobs, Hide and Seek, and the urban environment

The performance event is changing, is melding, is mashing up with the new narrative strategies emerging from contemporary digital culture. It is moving into the urban environment, and through an embodied audience. The age of the first person is coming; gaming culture, and the ludic heritage of our childhoods are merging with performative, pedagogical practices and forming the pervasive game.

[…] pervasive games are not new human activities. […] Play becomes pervasive only in a modern society that erects boundaries to be pervaded by such games. (Montola, Stenros and Waern 2009, 257)

Pervasive games can be defined as play expanded out of traditional performative or ludic space in one or all of three ways; spatially (it moves through everyday space), temporally (it is interacted with throughout everyday time) or socially (it is played with/around the public).

Contemporary life has brought us “the proliferation of spaces whose function seems only to be to facilitate our ‘passing through’” (Buchanan and Lambert 2005, 3-4). Pervasive games oppose this by moving into the streets, inhabiting them

“The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language”  (McDonough 2004, 290)

Hide&Seek is the foremost pervasive gaming company in the UK. Their processes are collective, anyone can design a game, anyone can edit, their events are free to attend, touring ‘Sandpits’ are used to trial – ‘beta-test’ – and improve games, and regular large events and festivals are held where a diverse range of game designers run the most successful.

These games are playful explorations of constructing and re-constructing our selves, powerfully détourn-ing our relationships with the spaces and people around us. They do so in a ubiquitous fashion that the Situationists, those hackers of urban space, would have recognised as revolutionary. Continue reading…

Three Shorts.

These are three short pieces which appear in the half hour soundwalk I’m working on for the joint paper I’m currently working on. There’s a bit more information on the intent of the piece here. The sound work is currently finding itself structured around little snippets of story, all with the idea of looking at things as they are, without the way that expectation dulls them. As some philosophers might say, ‘un-covering’.

A story about thinking

You sit for days getting angrier and angrier at yourself. You speak sharply to your loved ones over the phone, you rearrange days with more and more unlikely workloads and cancel days off. You stop replying to emails, you fall asleep reading books and dream fitfully of not being able to speak. You feel like your eyes are swimming in vinegar and sand. And then, suddenly, you crack. You pull on you shoes, and a battered old coat, and you go for a walk.

A story about walking

You realise that you have not breathed fresh air for days. The air feels cool in your lungs. Reminds you of the first scent of winter on cold Autumn dawns. A fine mist of rain falls on your forehead, like the spray of the sea. You walk, and you realise that you have had your jaw clenched. You drift, and you notice the leaves beginning to litter the ground. You walk, and it is the movement that is important, the being-there, in context. Your forehead unwrinkles, and you close your eyes. Your mind is blissfully clear, no longer scrunched up as if un-vigilant, an important piece of knowledge could fall out your ears. You find yourself at home, walk through the door, you turn off the internet, and write 3000 words. It took a week, but also, half a day. Time skitters by. You call your loved ones and apologise.

A story about thought

There are people we send out, like scouts, into the darkness. They cannot see where they are going, they stub their toes, and walk into walls, but eventually, they know enough to construct a map. These people sometimes meet up, to discuss what they have found, and hopefully make the maps fuller; but instead of talking of the mistakes they made, and thet hings they felt on their way, they talk of the strength of their lines, and the certainty of the lettering on their drawings.