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“Futures Conversations” brings you thought-provoking dialogue showcasing the intersections of disciplines, ideas, and possibilities being tackled at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute.
[Electronic beat]
[Enda:] Welcome to Futures Conversations,
the Edinburgh Futures Institute podcast
that showcases
all the wonderful research taking place
at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Research at the Futures Institute
is challenge-led and interdisciplinary
addressing many of the greatest challenges
we face in the world today.
I'm your host, Enda Delaney,
the Director of Research at the Futures Institute.
[Electronic beat]
[Enda:] In this episode,
I'm joined by Professor Liz McFall.
Liz is professor of Sociology of Markets
and Director of the EFI
Data Civics Observatory.
Liz, just to get our discussion going,
could you tell us a little bit
about your background, where you grew up,
who inspired you,
what values were important to your family
and wider social group?-
[Liz:] So I'm from Broxburn,
which is a small former shale mining town
about nine miles west of Edinburgh.
On my father’s side, my history
traces back to Irish immigrants
who came to work the shale mines,
the shale oil industry.
Broxburn was a boom town for about
just under 100 years,
it was the biggest crude oil manufacturer
in the world for that period of time.
But the significant part of that for me,
erm...
growing up
there was that university wasn't really
a thought for people of my background,
people at my school.
So Edinburgh University
was obviously something we knew about,
and you knew of people who went there,
but it wasn't really a thinkable thought.
Even though I would say
from about the age of 13 or 14
I knew I had some level
of academic ambition.
So I went from school at the age of 16,
I wasn't quite at my 17th birthday,
to Queen Margaret College, which was then
in the second year of launching
a degree called Communication Studies.
I remember one of the nuns,
Sister Immaculata, saying to me,
“central institution degrees are not worth
the same as university degrees”, but
they had the same name, Bachelor of Arts,
so I didn't really understand that.
I think my biggest
understanding of university was from
watching University Challenge,
and I did not identify.-
[Enda:] And what was this route to academia
for you?
You're obviously- you're a professor
of Sociology now at Edinburgh University,
you know,
how did you get from Queen Margaret to-
to where you are today?-
by a very convoluted route.
[Liz:] By a very convoluted route.
So I was less than 17 years old
when I started my first degree in 1982.
By 1985, I had dropped out.
And it took me till 1987 to realise
that was a bad idea.
So I had to finish the degree,
which I did.
But that left me with an ordinary BA degree
at a time when
I was increasingly thinking
I want to get back to academic work.
So in about 1990,
I signed up for a master's degree.
The only master's degree I could get funding for
was one that included
Information Technology,
which the Scottish Office
was then funding master's degrees for.
This is immediately pre-internet,
so the information superhighway
was beginning to be talked about.
But no one really knew what that was.
And as someone
who wasn't really a technical person,
I didn't really understand
what it was either.
And it was interesting enough,
even though at least 50% of it was
a struggle for- for me to understand things
like the engineering of networks
that was starting to happen
and the little bits of coding on expert system shells
that I had to do,
which was probably
the worst three weeks of my life.
But there was a part of it
which was to do with
information technology or innovation policy,
which I did get very interested in.
That's why I did my dissertation in,
and the route that I took was about
the social and cultural determinants.
At that time, everyone was talking
about Japan, or to some extent, France,
as being exemplars
of how you support an innovation policy
that can enable economic recovery
to pick up really quickly.
And I had the sense
that this simply wouldn't work here
because you could see the cultural
and social determinants of
why that works in other places,
but wouldn't necessarily work here.
And I think that was probably
one of the things that reminded me
that the sociocultural dimensions
of economic policy
was kind of where my interest really lay.
I was always interested
in the kind of cultural
and promotional side of communication.
So I'd been very interested
in advertising,
but I was kind of interested not just in
how it looked, but how it worked.
So I started teaching in further education
in what was then called
Jewel and Esk Valley College,
and I was teaching marketing and
basically anything they asked me to teach
[laughs]
and this was a route for me to try
and figure out if I wanted to teach.
And around that time, I was hired by
the Open University as a part time tutor,
teaching
an Introduction to Social Sciences.
And this was really kind of
enlightening for me
because I remember in the early sort of,
staff development workshops
being asked: “well, what was my discipline?”
And I didn't have an answer,
I didn't know.
[laughs]
So it took about three years of teaching
on that course to realise that
if I had a home,
it was more sociology than anything else,
but I still considered myself
a very kind of unconventional,
sociology-adjacent type person
in a kind of academic disciplinary way,
if not an intellectual way.-
[Enda:] I started my academic career
in the Open University as well, and
I mean, I'm interested to know if you
you feel that the values of,
of the Open University, that you've sort
of carried them with you through-
throughout your career, their emphasis on
social inclusion, diversity of learning,
different cohorts of people that they attract?-
[Liz:] Oh, absolutely.
The Open University, certainly
as it was when I joined in the early ‘90s,
has absolutely shaped my values
and what- what
I hold most sacred,
if you like in higher education,
and that is to do with accessibility
to all.
It's also to do with making content
that is going to work
on a variety of different levels,
for a variety of different abilities
and a variety of different backgrounds.
The way that the Open University did that,
certainly in the social sciences,
was to present dimensions
of everyday life to students.
So you're meeting students
where they already are.
You're kind of engaging them with things
they already know,
and just pushing a bit further
to try and think about
aspects of everyday life,
making the familiar strange.
And at that time, you had people
like Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey
on Open University broadcasts,
which were still happening on BBC2
late at night,
but also on more mainstream
programs like The Late Show, expressing
and communicating these ideas.
And this kind of blew me away
because I hadn't thought about
disciplines in that way.-
[Enda:] This emphasis on the everyday, I think,
fits very much into what you do at EFI,
running the Data Civics Observatory,
which I know has being inspired by the
the great town planner and polymath,
Patrick Geddes.
Could you tell us a little bit about what
the Observatory does, what-
what its purpose is
and how you see that, er,
informing policy, society more generally?-
[Liz:] When I first heard about
the Edinburgh Futures Institute, I was blown away
by how much this kind of geographical site
had changed.
And the ideas for the Edinburgh Futures
Institute
at that moment
were just mind blowing to me in terms of
what looked
like a commitment to doing-
to doing education a bit differently,
to making, as the saying goes,
a more porous-walled university.
So it was much less cut off from the city,
and that went on to inform
the ideas behind the Data Civics Observatory.
When I first encountered
the work of Patrick Geddes,
it was when I came back to Edinburgh
and did that thing
that people often do when they've left
the city and returned 20 years later,
I was looking at it with new eyes
and trying to map together
what the city I had known and loved,
actually all my life, but particularly
in the ‘80s and ’90s when I lived here,
to the changes that had taken place,
and to try and
look for, probably for the first time,
at how the city functioned technically
and materially.
I think that sort of slowly
led me to the work of Patrick Geddes,
who appealed to me
enormously as I started to find out
more about him for all sorts of reasons.
But most keenly was the idea
that he was a very,
very keen observer and a very eclectic
observer of everyday life.
So he had been developing a whole bunch
of different visual techniques
for watching the city, observing the city,
trying to understand
how people lived within it,
but trying to understand it
not just from a scholarly perspective,
trying to understand it
because he wanted to intervene,
taking a close watch on the city.
But secondly,
the idea of conservative surgery,
because this Royal Mile, this,
part of the Old Town
that looks like it's always been that way,
actually owes much of its appearance
to the kind of interventions
that Geddes and his, erm,
followers and community actually made.
So the appearance of decked access,
the little balconies
on which you'll see plant pots,
and so forth, and the green areas around
Ramsay Gardens,
these are a direct result of his
quite early commitment to conservative surgery.
Not treating, erm,
problematic areas of cities
as something that needed
to be completely bulldozed, modernised.
Conservative surgery
was “let's save the important bits
and improve them
and make them more liveable.
Let's deal with these kind of every-
things that everybody wants
a bit of natural light, green space,
housing that's not dark, crowded, damp.”
That was really appealing to me,
this kind of combined
observatory and laboratory on the city
as a sort of thing
that EFI might be able to sort of reinvent-
and this sort of settlements
project reinvention, this idea that,
well, we are responsible for the city more
than just as an employer,
more than just as a landlord, and more than just
as an education institute.
We have expertise
that should be intervening in the city
and- and has the capacity with things
like the City Region Deal to do it.
The Data Civics Observatory
basically just tries to reinvent
Geddes’ core ideas
for a- a contemporary context.
Also provide you an insight to
how those cities are functioning
how people feel about those cities,
whether they're visitors,
short-term residents, or long-term residents.
So we've experimented
with a number of small projects to try and
do a Geddesian type thing of, erm,
observing and experimenting with, well,
how does it work to watch the city
and sort of almost play it back to it?
So amplify the knowledge that's already
out there amongst local communities.-
[Enda:] Maybe just be worth explaining
for the listeners the sort of
socioeconomic context
of- of Granton Waterfront
and what you've been involved in
doing there.-
[Liz:] Sure, erm,
so Granton is in an area
that borders
the Forth, along the Firth of Forth
after the Industrial Revolution,
it becomes very significant
in terms of Edinburgh's transition,
to using gas energy.
So the train lines,
which are now cycle paths,
stretch along the North shore
and they end up in Granton,
and they would have fed the gasworks,
which gradually in the 20th century,
became also places
where a lot of early municipal
housing estates grew up.
So you get this
dense social housing appearing,
sometimes
under quite severe economic constraints.
So the building- housing itself,
even though some of it was award-
award-winning in its time, was probably not
manufacturers
of the best quality materials.
So flats became damp, erm,
they became dirty,
they became hard to maintain,
they became very cold in the winter.
And at the same time this was happening,
the economic fortunes
were starting to fail.
So you had a period
where this bulk of housing,
the density of housing,
had grown up very quickly and
in advance of the infrastructure,
in advance of the green spaces and the shops
and schools that you need to
sort of, form
the social and cultural life of a city.
To cut a long story short, in the postwar period,
areas like Granton,
despite whatever hopes there were for them,
became centres of a concentration
of multiple deprivation.
And you get the same patterns,
if you look at the
Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation,
all surrounding the perimeters
of Edinburgh, you get the dark colours,
the blacks that indicate
a high index of multiple deprivation.
And it's striking how much that
the social topography of Edinburgh
actually resembles its natural topography,
where you have
this volcanic peak in the centre
sloping away down to the south and the north.
The interest in Granton
as a Data Civic Observatory project
came from well, let's
try and understand how this has happened.
And also particularly from,
to go back to the City Region Deal,
the fact that the Granton Waterfront
development project had started there,
and this is a very long-term,
public sector-led project
designed to take a more sustained
and comprehensive approach
to regeneration in the area.-
[Enda:] So I wanted to move on to ask you
a little bit about the visual dimension to-
to your work.
There's a very strong visual, erm, dimension.
Both in the Granton Civicscope
and also the work of the AreWeData Collective.
Why is the visual dimension
so important for- for what you do?-
[Liz:] I think there's all sorts of aspects
to it.
The most obvious one is having
the background at the Open University
The Open University
taught in a very visual way,
because if you're not seeing students
face to face,
you need all sorts of tools to make, erm,
ideas come alive for them.
It takes 20 to 40 minutes to watch
the kinds of films that
the collective I’m involved with make,
and I hope to kind of make people feel
something as a result of watching
these films, not just acquire facts, but
acquire
a sort of feeling to be literally moved
by, well, this is the history of the place
that I live in.
This is the history of why this shop layout
is this shop layout.
Very, very ordinary and very, very mundane.
But how it happens is really fascinating.
And you can tell those stories in film
in a way that you can’t, erm,
in an academic paper,
and you certainly can't tell them
to the sort of variety of audiences that, erm,
I hope are out there.-
[Enda:] I'm fascinated by your research
on the sociology of markets,
particularly your work on the insurance industry,
erm, can you tell us a little bit
about the insights that’s offered
by your research on an industry
that perhaps mightn't be seen as the most
obvious place for a sociologist to work on?-
[Liz:] Being a sociologist of markets,
and particularly
a sociologist of insurance,
puts you in quite a- quite a narrow group.
And this has struck me
as somewhat bizarre.
Insurance, in many ways, is the very first
mechanism for the distribution of risk.
It’s how we collectivise
and share across a society.
So it's at the very political
and social centre
of how societies are organised
economically.
It's fate matters in terms of
how risk is distributed
and who pays for it in society.
And in the last 100 years,
there has been a fairly steady
individualisation of that risk,
both in terms of how individuals
insure themselves against calamities
or plan for their future,
in terms of their pensions.
But also in terms of how the social
and political infrastructures
on which we all rely are funded.
A similar pattern can be observed
in almost every field of insurance,
including things like, climate insurance.
Notoriously, the capacity of individuals
to insure homes in flood-prone areas has diminished.
And behind the scenes of that,
there's this kind of jostling between, erm
private and public measures
for collectivising
or individualising risk,
which are not straightforward.
That sometimes we are towards
a more social collective solution
and other times
to a very individual solution.
And tracking that through tells
you a great deal about the sort of social
and political settlement.
I was quite simply fascinated by
how you get people to buy products
that they don't want, like, need, understand.
And life insurance is a fantastic example of that,
particularly life insurance that was bought
by poor customers, working class customers.
So the early appetite for insurance were,
the very poorest in society
would devote a substantial proportion
of that income, at a time
when they could barely feed the family,
to paying for this arcane
financial product.
That seemed to me a fascinating social
and sociological problem.
To understand how that worked.
I should probably
also mention that my father sold
this form of insurance [laughs]
So from the- all through the late
1960s to the 1970s,
I was the social accompaniment
to an agent that helped-
I'm making this sound terrible.
I didn't help my my father on his rounds,
but it was common
for this to be seen as a family
and community arrangement.-
[Enda:] How does this fit into the work
that you've done,
you have been a pioneer
in the field of cultural economy and, erm,
that's a really important field.
What do you think that field offers us
at the moment,
and indeed, given our emphasis
in the Futures Institute, erm,
down the line in- in the future?-
[Liz:] Cultural economy at its core is a project,
and certainly, as I understand it,
is all about
the orchestration of technique
and sentiment,
by which I mean that you have
to understand the way that the material,
technological, economic and financial
forms of organisation intersect
with how meaning is created
for the customers in that marketplace.
How does this product mean something?
If you take the example of insurance,
you're dealing with a product
that people don't understand.
So you need some kind of interaction
that makes it makes sense
and makes it be meaningful.
So that is kind of trying to understand
always
the intersections between culture
and economy.
That culture is not this realm outside,
that’s not this kind of purified state
of highest civilisation
that humankind can reach.
Culture is meaningful.
Activity is meaningful practice.
So cultural economy is a project,
whether it's applied to high frequency trading,
climate, risk,
data surveillance
always has that interest
at looking at the sort of material,
political, technological
arrangements and infrastructures
of a given empirical case-
[Enda:] One of the things I've been really struck,
Liz, talking to you
is you've got a very strong historical perspective.
As a historian I obviously value that. And...
it's great to have, that sort of said,
why do you-
why do you think it's so important for us
to understand the past,
to inform the present and the future?-
[Liz:] For me, it's absolutely crucial
to have a perspective on the past.
I remember one of my colleagues,
Yuval Millo, was saying to me,
well, basically
all sociology is historical.
Even if you're studying the newest form
of algorithmic trading, it's historical
because you can only look backwards
as an empirical object.
You can only look backwards.
I think if you're a sociologist
studying a present day phenomena,
you're always kind of looking backwards
to look forward.
Understanding where we're pointing to
in the future involves understanding
how the past
got to be the way that it was,
and what the intersection of,
whether it's regulatory
apparatus or,
economic cycles or the change in fashion.
There is a lesson for that.
I'm probably going to have to go back
to the industrial insurance example again,
partly because one of the things
that really killed that industry
is it became unfashionable.
It became unfashionable to have a product
that was directed- a financial product
that was directed only at working class
people.
It fell out of the step-
out of step with everyday life.
People didn't want an insurance agent
calling at their doors anymore.
So everyday life,
the patterns of everyday life changed.
And understanding that is germane
to understanding what happens
to the financial industries
in the second half of the 20th century.
Unpicking how the-
how the world was structured,
the financial world was structured then
to where we are now-
[Enda:] One thing that I think is...
a part of contemporary societies
is concerns about the amount of data
that private companies,
be they insurance companies, our banks,
hold about us all.
Do you think that's a legitimate
concern on the part of citizens
across the world?-
[Liz:] I think it probably is a legitimate concern,
but I think for me,
I come at it slightly differently.
I want to understand the specificities
of how data is operating in particular,
rather than just kind of
go to the big headline
banner of surveillance capitalism
and the assumption that we are heading
towards a darker and darker place
I want to understand how datafied
applications and platforms
are useful or not useful to people,
but I also want to understand
the specificities
of how they function commercially.
So in my own field of, erm,
studying insurance and life
and health insurance
and how it's been affected by big data
and the drive towards
more individualisation of-
or personalisation of insurance products,
I think it was easy to assume,
say, with the example of the introduction
of self-tracking devices
having those attached to insurance policies,
it's easy to assume that- that this is a step towards
personalising risk
so that every individual is priced for
how much activity they do,
how many bags of crisps they eat
so that their individual health risk
is measured and priced accordingly
and they could be knocked
out of the insurance market.
In my own empirical research,
that's simply not what we found.
To classify and price individual
risk at that level
using these devices
just is not how insurance risk functions.
So in that particular example,
the incorporation
of self-tracking products in life
and health insurance
has got much more to do with marketing
and attaching people to products.
If you give a free Apple Watch with,
interactive behavioural life
or health insurance product,
people like Apple Watches,
they don't like insurance.
So attaching the two together,
you get some brand equity transfer,
you get some, you know, sticky attachment
where people want their Apple Watch,
even if they don't
love their insurance policy.
So there's something else going on there.
That you don’t discover-
this is basically a defence of, erm,
if you've got this pressing public issue
to approach it
empirically as the best work
in critical data studies now does,
it's like, well, what is the-
how is data being used in this particular instance
rather than the large headline stories-
[Enda:] My sense is that one element that you feel
is that this data can empower communities,
particularly local communities.
Is that a-
through use of data
in order to present cases
or socioeconomic profiles
that communities can,
in fact be empowered, rather than it
just being something that's imposed
on communities, if that makes sense?-
[Liz:] I mean, I think there are some intriguing
examples of that in practice.
And some of the urbanists
who've looked to Patrick Geddes for-
for example,
to- to try and make sense of how
urban life could be less
sort of a smart city
kind of top down version
of how you manage cities.
But a grassroot- grassroots,
bottom up version have looked at the way
in which communities
can develop their own platforms
or use existing platforms to share data
and to organise their activism.
One of the things that I didn't remember
to mention earlier on about an area
like Granton;
Granton may have scored very highly
in the Multiple Index of Social Deprivation,
for decades,
but it's also been a centre of, erm,
grassroots,
sustained activism over many decades.
And I think
that in the contemporary context,
there are examples starting to appear
of communities using platforms to do that.
You could look at very mundane things,
like the prevalence of
neighbourhood WhatsApp groups or Nextdoor,
which is an app
that communities use to
to share information.
But also the appearance on platforms
like Substack, which have- are beginning
to rediscover the power of community
newspapers, because that's a much,
much more cost effective way
than actually printing a newspaper now.
So you get a newsletter
which circulates and shares
that kind of density of local issues
and organises
a sense of belonging, potentially,
and community ownership.
And I think that those kinds
of things, there are also
placemaking type
instances of the use of Instagram
and Twitter to kind of
just share the status
of an area of the type of where I live,
like Newhaven, its appearance and social media
over the years does change the texture
and flavour
of that place in some positive ways
and in some negative ways.
So I think there is the potential there
to use new forms of data in a grassroots
organising way to type of redress
and organise
something alternative to the idea of
well the council
is going to make a big change, and
we're going to do community consultation
as a more kind- there may be people
who will never go to a community consultation exercise,
but they may well post on Instagram
or on Twitter
or somewhere else about- or Nextdoor-
about those issues.
So if instead of demanding the resource from
communities and individuals to tell us
what's happening in your community,
councils and other voluntary bodies
can then look at
what are people
actually saying about this place?-
You've been involved in the
Edinburgh Futures Institute for a number of years,
being a very important person
in designing what the-
what the Futures Institute, erm,
does, and what its outlook and what-
what we would- would see as priorities
in terms of research.
What sort of future
do you envisage given your expertise?-
[Liz:] So that's a great huge question [laughs]
Enda, thank you.
So one of the things that I've done
since I've been involved in EFI is
I’ve almost finished making the second film,
which tracks what the role of institutes
like Edinburgh Futures Institutes
have in terms of managing the future.
And one of the jobs of those films
is to try and showcase
the expertise of people
who are trying to wrestle with these,
problems about the major catastrophes
or challenges,
wicked problems, whatever
intractable issue
the future seems to be representing.
But it's also an attempt
not just to showcase
the individual expertise,
but to better understand
why futures institutes and City
Region Deals and other forms of innovation complex
are springing up now
and what their chances are.
So there is this orthodoxy,
if you like, that,
interdisciplinarity, co-production
and cross-sectoral working
gives us the best chance of understanding
these complex, intractable problems and,
providing a response to them
in the future.
And to some extent,
that's a difficult proposition
because in terms of interdisciplinarity,
it's easier
to say than it is to do in a meaningful level.
And the same is true
of cross-sectoral work.
It is probably the best strategy
that we have.
It's a kind of modest
and pragmatic attempt to
mobilise and orchestrate and organise
this- the mixture of talents
that we need to discover and address
the specificity of problems
and what I would contrast it with,
to go back to Patrick Geddes,
is an opposition to the sort of tabula rasa
the blank slate
version of oh well we’ll wipe all this out,
we’ll wipe out all these problems,
and we'll start again.
And this kind of new techno-libertarian
geopolitical imaginary
that you will see,
and visions coming out of a vision like California
Forever, which is a bunch of tech billionaires
trying to engineer a new future in California
by buying up large tracts of land
and those kind of large scale projects of,
well, let's start again,
we'll have a smart city
and we'll make it sustainable,
and we'll have vertical gardens
like in NEOM in Dubai,
which are not grounded,
in the people who actually live there.
And in a way, I think that the attempt
by futures institutes
and City Region Deals and the others at
their best because of their-
their necessary incorporation
of a variety of interest groups
and their willingness to experiment
with new tools are probably-
probably about as helpful
and positive a response
as- certainly as I can think of-
[Enda:] Well, thank you very much
for an optimistic, message on which to-
to leave us on and indeed for,
erm, giving us these fascinating insights
into the work that you're undertaking
at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
If you want to find out more about Liz's
work, if you go to our website:
www.efi.ed.ac.uk
or follow us on social media channels.
[Electronic beat]