Participle

On a wet and windy beach, which made me think about families, youth, the Beveridge welfare state..

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell.  Set in Manchester in the 1840s – a period of industrial unrest and extreme deprivation, at the height of the industrial revolution – this novel tells the story of Mary, a factory worker’s daughter whose beauty attracts the attention of the mill owner’s son.  A page turning Victorian romance, Mary Barton made headlines in its day for its realistic portrayal of the lives of the mill workers and their acute suffering.  Chronic hunger, infant deaths, atrocious living conditions and the struggles of the early union movement...it’s a sobering reminder of just how much our welfare state and the original Beveridge achieved.

Governing the Present by Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose.  These two LSE academics have spent the last decade thinking about how personal and social lives have become the subject of government.  They look closely at how issues become constructed as ‘problems’ and in particular how policy has come to focus on behaviours and engineering the human soul.  They argue that it is false to think of issues waiting to be uncovered or discovered – they are rather things constructed and Miller and Rose are interested in how something is made into a policy area.  So far, so good.  What is great is the way they explore these ideas through numerous everyday mechanisms from accounting, to advertising.  It’s pertinent and challenging for our work.  Did you know that the idea of ‘growth’ as a key indicator of economic health only emerged in the 1960s?  Because the technology finally existed for measurement.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.  With the rest of the Dominican diaspora, I have been waiting 10 years for Diaz to write this book, after reading his brilliant collection of short stories, Drown.  It was worth it.  A great sancocho of science fiction, Dominican history and family sagas.  ‘What did you know about states or diasporas?  What did you know about Nueba Yol or children whose self hate short circuited their minds?  What did you know … about immigration?’ Apart from being wildly original and entertaining this fiction tells the story of the myriad ways in which behaviour seen as perverse by the social policy makers is a deeply rational response to realities at the margin.