This paper is a Work in Progress The Work of Education and Research for times of Crisis and Protest John

Schostak Education and Social Research Institute Manchester Metropolitan University j.schostak@mmu.ac.uk Talk prepared for Public Seminar, Oxford Learning Institute Oxford University June 9, 2011 Before we begin, have a look at this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=IGQmdoK_ZfY), it sets up a theme that will run throughout the talk. What counts? Its a fundamental question for any form of research that seeks to be radical, emancipatory, empowering, participative and so on. The what in question is the complex of agencies that compete for the attention of people under an organising regime that dominates or structures a given territory of play. Behind what counts? is who counts and in whose interests is something or someone counted? One such regime may dominate because the military, the police, the legal system whose power and privileges depend on elites can be relied upon to instil fear, generate submission and enforce compliance. Other regimes may employ more subtle means involving management of people through a variety of civilising institutions such as the media, education, churches. Each may enjoy a certain legitimacy to the extent that a sufficient percentage of the population feel safe enough to engage in a normal life, that is, their general needs for everyday security, food, shelter, family life and a bit of fun and leisure are met. Beyond that, its a game of winners and losers - or fraudsters and suckers on the grand scale, the global scale. In such a game, for it to succeed on the global scale, the strategies that are required for the game are to be accepted as the only ones that can be employed ideally, at the extreme, there is no alternative, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it during the years of the games ascendance in the 1980s. So, what is it that has to be set into place to misdirect attention from any alternative that would undermine the continuous and increasing accumulation of the wealth produced by the many for the few? How can this be properly researched, analysed, theorised, challenged, deconstructed and replaced? And replaced by what? How? if not fully, then at least to sketch a response to these immense questions, I want to draw upon two key and interconnectable - events this year: wikileaks and what has been called the Arab Spring in the context of the financial crisis that opened up in 2008 and is still being played out politically, economically, socially and personally. Both events, I want to argue are fundamentally educational, and furthermore, I want to say, the educational is the condition and the means for the emergence of the human, the humane, and the humanitarian understanding of ourselves as people who live together to create, act, and experience

all that life can mean. So what do I need to do to make this sketch? The educational is a work of emergence and understanding and the research is a work of questions and methodology. In my view both research and education are fundamental in dismantling the hegemonic frameworks of interests through which are knotted together ideas, forms of organisation and capital to provide the machinery and architectures of machineries by means of which the harmless citizen of postindustrial democracies readily does everything that he is asked to, inasmuch as he leaves his everyday gestures and his health, his amusements and his occupations, his diet and his desires, to be commanded and controlled in the smallest detail by apparatuses (Agamben 2009:22-23) In many ways the term apparatus does not provide an adequate translation of Foucaults term dispositif which as Agamben describes it is used to distinguish between two forms of being. On the one hand there is everything that is constructed by human thought and action; on the other there is everything else. A dispositif, at its most general refers to the former, the human constructions and is what is available to people at a given time to make something happen. So for example, elites have at their disposal at any given time a particular arrangement of resources, machineries, and organisations of power to manage the masses upon which they depend for their wealth, wellbeing, prestige and security. It is what enables people to enhance their powers to bring about something according to their demands, desires and fantasies. For the purposes that I want to use it here, the dispositif may be thought of as like the game-board, pieces, codes of legitimacy and strategies that exhaust the possibilities of political play and the possibilities for knowing and making a world according to ones own or some collective political will to bring about a state of affairs. As a shorthand, I will use the term political to cover any action having a , psychological, social, economic, ethical aesthetic and broadly cultural purpose, effect or dimension. Change any of the elements of the dispositif, and of course, the possibilities of political play change, as in changing from draughts to chess though employing the same board. It is a tension between capture by and emancipation through disposifs. Two final key terms. They have already been introduced, but rather quietly, as part of the taken for granted notions of political order. The first is power. It is useful to distinguish between two forms of power as does Hardt in the preface to Negris book on Spinoza: In general, Power denotes the centralised, mediating, transcendental force of command, whereas power is the local, immediate, actual force of constitution. It is essential to recognise clearly from the outset that this distinction does not merely refer to the different capabilities of subjects with disparate resources and potentialities; rather, it marks two fundamentally different forms of authority and organisation that stand opposed in both conceptual and material terms, in metaphysics as in politics in the organisation of being as in the organisation of society. (Hardt in Negri 1991: xiii) Following this procedure we could describe the dispositifs available to elites in terms

of the relatively stable, organised aggregations of peoples individual powers that are turned back on them as instruments, discourses and apparatuses of Power. In this alienated sense Power seems obdurate, unalterable, and takes on the status of the Real that cannot be overthrown. Of course, there are those rare events when this Real crumbles and a sense of there being new possible worlds opens up, bearing alternative visions of realities to be created. Whether it is the French, American and Russian Revolutions or more recently the fall of the Eastern Bloc symbolised in the fall of the Berlin Wall November 9th 1989, or the Arab Spring of 2011, such events remind us that the edifice of Power melts as the people, the multitudes, the crowds that sustain it progressively withdraw their support from the constant, dedicated attention involved in the work that is required for its maintenance . So, the final key term is work. Arendt (1994) distinguishes work from labour and from action. The distinctions provide a useful first reflection on the nature of work and the construction of human worlds. They are hierarchically arranged with labour at the bottom. Where labour is essentially involved in providing for basic biological needs, work is about collectively transforming the physical world as in architecture, modes and systems of transport to create a shared artificial world according to the desires of people. However, it is in action that the decisions are made concerning what kind of world is appropriate. Action is then at the pinnacle, directing work and labour. It is the sphere of politics. Labour, work and action are very much about the ways in which the powers of individuals are organised. However, there is a good argument for recombining these three forms of human activity as made by Dejours (1998; see also Deranty 2008) in his study of suffering in France. In order to engage in the work of creating a human or artificial world of cities, farmlands, sites of entertainment and culture this already necessitates attention to the labour required to meet biological needs and the collective organisation of activities to create tools, machineries, buildings and commodities of all kinds. Implicit in such forms of organisation are the co-dependencies required in undertakings that cannot be accomplished by an individual alone. Decisions have to made about who does what when and where with what resources. People will need to make their voices heard, listen to the views of others and then make collective decisions. In deciding how and to what effect people make their voices heard in organisational decision making Arendts realm of action is already implicit in the activities associated with work. Will those voices be heard democratically or will only certain voices be considered valid? Will some voices be overruled through the use of force? In short, work already prefigures the political and cannot divorce itself from fulfilling the biological necessities Arendt associated with labour. In Dejours view, it is this amplified notion of work that is under constant attack by contemporary neoliberal market philosophies and practices leading to considerable suffering, even to the point of suicide. In this view, there is what may be called a neoliberal dispositif that has as its purpose the (dis)organisation of work in the interests of wealth elites. Neoliberalism promotes freedom only under conditions of competition between individuals whose success in the competition depends on either their talent, their work or their accumulated capital or some combination of all in order to produce and accumulate individually owned private wealth. A key separation is made between: 1) work accomplishable only through the co-dependencies of the many; and 2) the ownership of the products of work by others who do not necessarily engage in the work process itself but only supply the capital; that is, capital that has been produced in a similar way. This separation between ownership and the products of work enables a system

of employment where none of the employed have rights of ownership of the products of their work. In this system, those who have capital have freedom to dispose of that capital in any way they like while those who do not find their freedoms restricted by the conditions of employment made available to them. Since, those without capital have to seek employment to obtain the money required for their living expenses, then their freedoms are defined by the amount of money they receive. Since they have no ownership of the product, they have no voice in how the rewards are distributed; hence their views are not valid. Thus there is nothing to stop the owner paying less than the worth of the product. This again is a restriction on freedom. If there is a restricted choice of employment available then people are free only to compete for the restricted opportunities made available. If there is no employment, then they are without freedom. As Simmel (2004: 308-14) pointed out, since money is equivalent to freedom, so the richest are the freest. In short, neoliberalism promotes freedom without equality which in turn means the greatest freedoms are restricted to those who do not need to compete for employment. Freedom for all is sustainable then only if backed by some combination of work, talent and capital to produce the goods and services upon which everyone is equally co-dependent for the quality of their everyday life. Similarly money is worthless unless it can be exchanged for goods and services, that is, unless it is backed by the product of work. If work is how the powers of people are combined to produce the conditions of their freedoms; then Power is the means by which those freedoms are curtailed in the interests of those elites who are best able to access the dispositifs through which people are denied ownership of the products of their work. Those who have no other recourse than to seek employment are thus dependent upon the forms and conditions of work offered by employers. Since neoliberalism sees any form of collective constraint by employees on work conditions as an impediment to the free play of market forces, then the conditions of employment are precarious. Crisis and natural catastrophe exacerbate the conditions of precarity. And as Klein (2007) has shown neoliberals use crises and catastrophes whether natural or engineered in order to take advantage of a collapse in prices and the disorientation of populations to buy up property, resources, bankrupted businesses and to pass laws that contribute to freeing up the market by reducing regulation and collective resistance by employees and by reducing the burden of taxation by the reduction of Public or Welfare spending. Klein calls this approach the shock doctrine. Nevertheless, under conditions of crisis and shock there is also the possibility of protest. Protest is not the voice of co-equals, it is the cry, the chant, the withdrawal of assent, the disobedience that results when enough is enough. If work in its fullest sense is what is repressed by neoliberalism, protest against the crises caused by neoliberalism could be called the return of the repressed. Protest and the role of research and education If protest is a return of the repressed what are the implications for education and the design of research to create the conditions for listening and taking into account the protesting voices excluded by systems of subordination in order to create new inclusive social forms of social organisation? Protest is rather like the stone thrown into the calm waters of a lake, a lake of capitalist accumulation. The dynamics involved in a return to normal can be seen and explored. It is rather like the work of Garfinkels ethmomethodological practice of deliberately causing trouble to identify the tacit rules that are being broken. As a protest against the secrecy of elites in government and private corporates, wikileaks breaks the rules on confidentiality.

Having an internet and thus transnational presence, it breaks the rules on location and thus hinders governance and the application of national laws. In particular, it breaks the rules that define the nature of a public, how a public acts, what a public can know, and the conditions under which information becomes known, is open to evaluation, validation and generalisation across a public. These are the kinds of structures, mechanisms, rules that are always there but not always noticed, or at least, are tolerated without further comment and action. From these I think of two kinds of pedagogies: the first, may be called the manufacture of consent after Lippman (1922) and Bernays (1947) which evokes something of Lowes reported comments following the 1868 extension of franchise that we must now educate our masters. Bernays (1928) strategy, for example, saw the emergent market democracy as a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses. This intelligent minority forms what Bernays called the invisible government: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. (Bernays 1928: 27) The approach was to use the research and methodologies of the social sciences to manipulate the opinions and behaviours of the masses for the benefits of business and political leaders (see: BBC 2002; Tye 1998). The second group of pedagogies, might be called the emancipatory. They evoke something of the method of doubt of Descartes and the free and public use of reason in all matters of Kants (1784) enlightenment project. In terms of these two kinds of pedagogies I want now to look briefly at some reactions to wikileaks. My first examples are the responses by Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. Sarah Palin saw him as an anti-American operative with blood on his hands and wanted him hunted down (Telegraph 30 Nov 2010). And: Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and possible Republican presidential candidate provided a harsh assessment of what he believes to be an appropriate punishment for the source of the latest WikiLeaks transmission of U.S. embassy cables, saying that "anything less than execution is too kind a penalty." (Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/30/mike-huckabeewikileaks-execution_n_789964.html) There is here a presumption of legitimate violence and the legitimate threat of violence. Indeed, under the rule of state law, a state is the sole source of legitimate violence. In the Hobbesian (1651) view, of course, people in the state of nature will engage in a war of all against all unless brought to peaceful order by the greater threat of violence by the State as Leviathan. It is a view that sits well with a notion of the 'survival of the fittest' and the rule of competition underlying neoliberal global political and economic practice. For the political theorists Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss politics only comes into play with the advent of the enemy, the choosing of sides. It is this that creates the strong definition of the state, the people defined as 'us' against 'them'. Their influence on American, UK and global politics has been

described by Norton (2004) and Klein (2007). It can be seen in Regan's Evil Empire characterisation of The Soviet Bloc as well as the Axis of Evil and the War Against Terror of Bush Jr. Knowing your enemies works both between states as well as within states where activists are seen to undermine the workings of the State and the prevailing cultural, political, economic order they become the enemy within as Margaret Thatcher called them. For Arditi (2007) under contemporary global conditions, there is no longer an outside where the enemy resides, the enemy is always inside and to be contained rather like a cyst. It is in this sense, I think, that Murray in his letter to Prime Minister Blair argued for a custodialised democracy (2005) in order to contain the dangerous underclasses (1990, 2000). It is in this sense, too I think, that Palin implied that Assange, the Australian co-founder of wikileaks, was treasonous in a now famous tweet:
Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book America by Heart from being leaked,but US Govt cant stop Wikileaks treasonous act? 6:25 AM Nov 29th, 2010 via Twitter for BlackBerry Retweeted by 100+ people

SarahPalinUSA

(Tweet by Sarah Palin) Such views, well publicized contribute to a climate of opinion that in turn create the conditions for action. In this case, very quickly the global corporations that enabled sympathizers to donate to the work of wikileaks such as PayPal, Amazon, Visa and Mastercard came under pressure to stop their support. A loose grouping of sympathetic computer hackers under the name of Anonymous then waged what many called the first cyberwar 1by carrying out DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attacks on these corporations. When wikileaks.org was taken down by government agencies, over 2000 mirror sites sprang up to provide multiple copies of the leaked material, making it impossible to prevent access. As an enemy within, traitorous, a legitimate target, wikileaks highlights the doubled edged nature of the global networks through which communications, finance and power are organised. First as Power, it is top down, state and corporate directed. Then as individuals communicating to other individuals it facilitates the rapid bottom up organisation of dispersed people into what may be termed countervailing forms of organisation. This then has implications for the work of education and research for the development and organisation of the powers of people as individuals, as communities and as co-operating, co-dependent collectivities having a mutual interest in creating forms of social organisation that meet their needs, interests and hopes for the good society. Protest, as it were, punches a hole in the desired surface skin of state, corporate and indeed, globalised Power and presents a challenge to education and research either to reinforce Power or to generate countervailing forms of knowledge, value and action based upon the powers of association and collective action of the many rather than the
1

see: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-12-07/julian-assange-sparks-hackerwar-over-wikileaks/

management of mass association and behaviour by elites. However, protest, by its very nature, is a voice against the mainstream raised as a shout, a cry, because its message is typically excluded from the spaces of governance that are reserved for the voices of Power. As a major threat to Power, at what point does protest become perceived as a breeding ground for terrorism? It is a dangerous space to occupy. Where is education and research in this? It comes down, I think, to a question of sides when what counts as truth, the facts, the right values, good behaviour, and the good society are at stake. Research funding, of course, will be allocated according to perceived policy priorities as in the case of the ESRCs Countering Terrorism in Public Spaces: The Arts and Humanities Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Engineering and Physical Science Research Council and National Security Advice Centre have allocated 2 million to co-fund projects emerging from the Countering Terrorism in Crowded Places Ideas Factory. The concept of the Ideas Factory is to organise interactive workshops (sand-pits) on particular topics, involving 20-30 participants. The sandpit was held over the course of a week in November 2006 and a group of researchers from a range of disciplines used this opportunity to develop long-term ideas for understanding and deterring terrorist behaviour and designing technologies and environments to combat the devastating impact of terrorist attacks. (see: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/about-esrc/what-we-do/ourresearch/terrorism.aspx) A further recent example recently publicised by the ESRC (April 20, 2011): A new report from the Religion and Society Programme, funded by the ESRC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, explores police-community partnerships to prevent extremism among Muslim youths. It highlights the importance of relationship-building between police officers and community members. (http://www.esrc.ac.uk/impacts-and-findings/featurescasestudies/features/15378/taking-terror-out-of-the-community.aspx ) In each case it is about shaping behaviour, shaping society. It depends, of course, how and in whose interests this is done and how it plays alongside the purposes of government policy such as the UKs PREVENT2 policy and its implications for institutions such as schools and universities to counter the radicalisation of students. A key issue here starts to emerge when such policies are employed in other contexts as the justification to focus on particular groups and contributing to the conditions for, for example, stop and search and surveillance policies. At one level, they are perfectly reasonable since it is about peoples security. However, to what extent do such reasonable motives open the way to an undermining of civil liberties? How can the principles of democratic freedom and human rights be suspended in certain circumstances, when does this state of exception (Agamben 1998, Butler 2010) become permanent? And so, when does research, education and policy aimed at dealing with the issue of terrorism become a means of diluting protest more generally whether these are strikes, demonstrations against corporations that are alleged not to be paying UK tax, or people marching to show their concern about public spending
2

see: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/counter-terrorism/review-of-prevent-strategy/

cuts? To what extent do research and education play into public relations and media campaigns to mould public opinion as a basis of further policy encroachment upon civil liberties? Education and Research in the Green Zone An article by Nir Rosen presents the critical issues from the point of view of a journalist: Too often, you consumers of mainstream media are victims of a fraud. You think you can trust the articles you read - why wouldn't you? You think you can sift through the ideological bias and just get the facts. But you don't know the ingredients that go into the product you buy. It is important to understand how knowledge about current events in the Middle East is produced before relying on it. Even when there are no apparent ideological biases, such as those one often sees when it comes to reporting about Israel, there are fundamental problems at the epistemological and methodological level. These create distortions, falsehoods and justify the narrative of those with power. (Rosen 2011) Now re-read this making the appropriate substitutions for education and then research, such as Too often, you students of mainstream schools/colleges/universities are victims. Rosen goes on to distinguish between those journalists who stay within the green zones of safety interviewing politicians and generals and those who venture into the dangerous red zones where the protests, uprisings, the violence is part of everyday life for the people. Similarly, research and education can either stay within the green zones or enter the red zones. In each case what is counted as known, valid, the facts, the reality will be at odds with each other. The green zone is the safe environment inhabited by journalists (as researchers, as educators) and the the interlocutors, translators and fixers they rely on to filter and mediate for them and the nature in which they collect information, accounts and interviews. (Rosen 2011). I think it is important to try to understand the structure and the structuring processes that maintain life in the green zone. The green zone is dominated by the forms of Power and thus manages the messages, the behaviours, the values, the attitudes, the forms of organisation that maintain that Power. As in the title of the book by Barber (2007) from a policy point of view, research and education are under an instruction to deliver. They are measured according to their performance. Attention is controlled and resourced according to the targets to be achieved, the themes to be addressed, the methods to be employed. It is critical then, when in the green zone, to notice how attention is being managed, in whose interests and for what purposes. In a sense, we are all embedded researchers and educators like those journalists embedded with the militaries at war. There is a choice, as described by Rosen (2011): My first embed in Iraq was in October 2003, six months after I first arrived. I was in the Anbar province. I saw soldiers arresting hundreds of men, rounding up entire villages, all the so-called military aged men, hoping somebody would know something. I saw children screaming for their daddies while they watched them bloody and beaten and terrified, while soldiers laughed or smoked or high-fived or chewed tobacco and spit on the lawn, as lives were being destroyed. I know one of the men I saw arrested died from torture, and

countless others ended up in Abu Ghraib. I saw old men pushed down on the ground violently. I saw innocent men beaten, arrested, mocked and humiliated. These are the little Abu Ghraibs that come with any occupation, even if it's the Swedish girl scouts occupying a country. (.) But if you are white and identify with white American soldiers, then you ignore these things, they just don't occur to you. And so they never occur to your readers. Embedded in the organization, institutions and systems of our everyday lives what do we see? Who do we identify with? Who counts? How will it be represented? And how does it impact upon our sense of meaning and well being? Given the centrality of work or rather, employment, in our lives, it is here where we must look for the day to day practices and circumstances that shape our lives and provide our answers to these questions. Dejours as a clinical psychoanalyst has made a study of workplace conditions as they impact on peoples health and wellbeing. In particular, he is concerned to understand the reasons for a lack of collective action against widespread social injustices. His argument is that people have become used to tolerating the intolerable. He draws from Arendts (1963) study of Eichman, focusing on the issue of the banality of evil and relates this to the toleration of harmful practices in industry, practices that can actually lead to physical harm because safety measures are stripped to the bare minimum or lead to psychological harms because of the intensification of work, the vulnerablity of workers to being made redundant. In the preface to his book he writes: What my inquiry on voluntary servitude in neoliberal systems shows, is that the majority of people can be enrolled in the service of a system whose methods they disapprove of profoundly. And it shows and this is the most striking thing that mobilisation in the service of the system can be obtained without the use of force. There are then, good reasons for researchers and philosophers to raise the alarm. From most of us, without the use of force, they get us to give our support to a system that increases inequalities and injustices and inflicts suffering on others right to the point of provoking suicide. (Dejours 2008: IX [my translation])) He provides many examples from his clinical cases of acute depression, use of drugs and attempted suicide. His argument is that as a consequence of the neoliberal turn from the 1980s it is not only the rate of unemployment that had changed, it had been the whole of society that had qualitatively transformed, to the point of no longer having the same reactions as formerly. To be more precise, essentially what were seeing is a change of social reactions to suffering, misfortune, and injustice. These changes are characterised by a diminution of the reactions of indignation, anger, collective mobilisation for solidarity and justice alongside these reactions of reserve, hesitation and perplexity , indeed, frank indifference, were developing as well as collective tolerance to inaction and

resignation in the face of injustice and the suffering of others. (Dejours 2008 preface to 1998: 26 [my translation]) In a later book Dejours (2003) explored more specifically the impact of new managerialist forms of performance measurement on the well being and social organization of people at work. The effect of continual assessment, the individualization of responsibility, loss of collective solidarity alongside an increase in job insecurity is a reduction of work to employment, and reduction of the public spaces in which voices can be heard, debates undertaken and collective decisions made concerning the quality of work. In short, the underlying pedagogy of work, wherever it is undertaken in managerially driven neoliberal organizations contributes to a progressive toleration of the intolerable leading to what Deranty (2008) calls a precarisation of existence. As researchers, as educators, in the green zone what do we concentrate on? Is it, for example the continual improvement of performance as in a focus on school effectiveness (see Hammersley 2007 for a collection mapping the debate) and high reliability schools (Reynolds 1996; Reynolds and Stringfield 1996) or is it the conversation out of sight, the act of bullying, the discrimination and subordination of children and staff that renders schools maladjusted to the needs, interests and experiences of various groups and individuals (Schostak 1983, 1993; Harber 2004)? Are we concentrating on meeting the performance targets and missing the point of life? The methodological task, I think, is to try to look elsewhere, that is, to see what is continually being missed. Research in the red zone and the return of the repressed Again, Rosen puts it well: One reason for the failure of journalists to leave their green zones may be a combination of laziness and aversion to discomfort. But in Iraq, Afghanistan, other developing countries and areas of conflict in some countries, you have to leave your comfort zone. You might prefer an English-speaking whiskeydrinking politician over six hours of bouncing along dirt roads in the heat and dust in order to sit on the floor and eat dirty food and drink dirty water and know you're going to get sick tomorrow, but the road to truth involves a certain amount of diarrhoea. (Rosen 2011) Looking elsewhere means leaving the comfort zone, so that new voices, new experiences may be presented. In my book on interviewing (2006) I tried to make the case for interviewing to be more than a method, to be itself a methodology through which voices play across and between the boundaries mapping the conditions, the practices, the forms of categorisation through which worlds are constructed, deconstructable and open to transformation. In this way through interviewing there is an open invitation for voices to be heard and thus pre-figures public space. Leaving the comfort zone, of course, means being open to the voices that are not normally heard because of their uncomfortable truths. Each interview is itself a composition of voices, each mapping their concerns, fears, hopes, agendas over one another. Each interviewee both projects a voice and suppresses others. The mapping of voices relevant to an account betweens in the as I said to her . or the they wont let us or I find their views unbelievable of a story as it unfolds. It is

here where some first insight into the voices that can be tolerated and those that cannot are organised. For example they may be organised into rationales, demands, pleas, seductions, complaints with voices tinged with anger, desire, hope, pleasure in deed, all the range of human expression and powers of the embodied mind. The research task is to go to the places where the full range of voices may be heard. If the voices heard in the green zone tell stories that give pictures of, and maintain, a particular view of the world, then going to the red zone opens the way for other voices to tell a different range of stories, stories that may undermine the careful presentations by the authorities of the green zone. In each case the dramatis personae of the stories told will differ significantly in terms of inclusions and exclusions as well as in terms of the different weightings given to the authority, veracity and believability of what is being told. The security of the green zone is matched by the insecurity experienced by people in the red zone. What is seen and experienced by one is not seen and experienced by the other. On each side, the stories told reflect back as in a kind of mirror what is seen, or is to be seen and accepted as real. In Schostak and Schostak (2008: 172) these are called mirror groups:

Diagram 1: Mirror Groups (Schostak and Schostak 2008: 172) As in diagram 1, suppose B is a group densely connected in terms of how they direct their attention towards each other. Each make an account of what they see, experience and how they act that each in turn reflect back to each other. It is a kind of

triangulation where a multiplicity of views reveal what is the same or different in the accounts that vary according to perspective. Similarly, group C is also able to make accounts that give a triangulation to reveal what is common and what is different. If the space of group B is the green zone and C is the red zone then the bar of the diagram that separates them effectively renders C invisible and inaudible to B. As the Egyptian uprising progressed, the television broadcaster Al Jazeera would split its screen to show on one side the extent of the crowds in Tahrir square or the results of sniper fire on the crowds of protesters; while the official channel on the other side of the screen showed calm streets with nothing much happening. It is from the point of view of the one who can see both that a different kind of assessment can be made. In research terms, referring to diagram 1: By participating in each group the researcher A is able to build up pictures (a1, a2) of how each constructs their ways of seeing the world with their different ontological commitments: whether the hard and fast realities of the social organization of gang territories or the views and fears of locals residents who want to freely walk the streets, or the police and other figures of social and political authority who have quite different conception of how the world should be organized. If group B represents the dominant voice in the social, political and economic organization of society it will see itself as exemplars of good order. The boundary that delimits their picture of the world acts like a mirror reflecting back their own values (represented by the double arrow in the diagram). For B, C is rendered marginal at best, perhaps an underclass, invisible at worst. Rendering the invisible visible means transgressing the bar between the dominant and the powerless. The role of the participant observer is already transgressive. Between these multiple camps, the participant observer is always to a degree out of place because always between worlds. The danger is in slipping into a position of authority granted by some superior insight into what is the right ways of seeing. (Schostak 2010) Who is the witness, who is doing the seeing? The lived quality of a report may provide a sense of authority. But how is that lived quality constructed? When journalists were prevented by the authorities from reporting in Egypt, Lybia, Syria, Yemen or Bharain, news and views were uploaded onto the internet. If journalists could not reach the scenes of action, then non-journalists provided tweets, accounts, pictures, videos using mobile phones. In a sense, Al Jazeera and other broadcasters - benefited from a crowd sourcing of the news. The lived quality of the reporting provided a sense of keeping it real. This lived quality consisted in the multiplicities of reportings from a multiplicity of sources. However, the lived quality itself as always, not enough. It is how the sources combine to produce a kind of greater triangulation of views that bring into focus key issues or witnessed facts. But there is another kind of witnessing that is of much more methodological significance than the what happened? of general eyewitness accounts. The witnessing I have in mind is the witnessing of the emergence of the lived reality and power of a mass, a people, a public. Against such a lived public in 1927 Lippman wrote a book on what he called The Phantom Public. By this he meant that there was no such thing as a public, rather as Thatcher famously said there was no such thing as society. Witnessing the existence or lack of existence of a Public or a

Society as such is, I think, a key aspect in how populations become managed and manageable whether by dictatorships or by those countries that label themselves as democracies. By hollowing out the meaning of a public, its function as the decision making body in a democracy can be appropriated by another body or other bodies that take the place of the public (Schostak 2010). Thus, instead of a democratic public that takes decisions, elites in government and the elites that provide expert advice and research evidence circumvent the need to have a public. Witnessing protest then invites an unwelcome resurrection of the phantom, the return, as it were, of what has been repressed in the exercise of governance. The cries on the streets witnessed during the Arab Spring demonstrate the powers of a revived public. It is the mass witnessing of the emergence of a public that can be so threatening to state and global Power. They also demonstrate the ways in which Power can resist. The success of the protesters in Egypt resulted in the fall of Mubarak on February 11, 2011. However, the military that played such a key role during the protests in safeguarding the protestors, has meant that the key dispositifs available to the ruling elites have enabled them to retain sufficient power to slow and manage the demands for democracy. In Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain the power of the military to suppress the uprisings have played out very differently. In each case the question of Western interests in relation to the uprisings reveals the extent to which the promotion of democracy has been sacrificed to global policies relating to the stability and the security of the global order. The critical question is, how is what we are witnessing via the media being managed? And what are the implications for our own sense of democracy? In the Western democracies such as the UK, elections may lead to changes of government but the apparatus of government, the organization of work and the institutions through which market mechanisms operate remain largely unchanged. The construction and maintenance of subordination is still fundamental to the vast majority of institutions and organisations of everyday life both at the local as well as the global level. Whether it is schools, hospitals, businesses, churches or places of entertainment like pubs, theatres, football grounds you will find in varying degrees of overtness, the multiple forms of management for the subordination of the mass to a variety of rules, practices, beliefs, values. Protest, when it occurs, has no space of its own to form a public arena where demands can be heard, and entered into debate as the basis for the development of decisions and actions. It appears in the streets, it occupies squares and buildings and is subject to the strategies of policing on the one hand and its media representation on the other. Once the protest is over and all is back to normal, what then? Beyond Protest Protest persistently points to something that is not there. To think about what this is, I will start with a key strategy developed by Gene Sharpe that has been employed in the Middle East and elsewhere before it (see Schostak 2011). It is a strategy based upon peaceful demonstrations. This, in Sharpes terms is critical because: By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority. The dictators are equipped to apply violence overwhelmingly. However long or briefly these democrats can continue, eventually the harsh military realities usually become inescapable. The dictators almost always have superiority in military hardware, ammunition, transportation, and the size of military forces.

Despite bravery, the democrats are (almost always) no match. (Sharpe 2010: 4) This holds true in the face of policing in western democracies where at any sign of violence strategies such as kettling can be deployed and the media can focus on the small incidents at the expense of the greater reasons for the protest as for example in the media coverage of the march by half a million people against government cuts held in London on March 26th, 2011. The focus was very much on the lurid pictures of violence and the lists of arrests, injuries and damage: 214 arrests after extremists hijack anti-government cuts demonstration 84 people injured - and at least 31 police officers hurt on day of violence Ritz hotel attacked with paint and smokebombs and 1,000 occupy Fortnum & Mason Protesters surge along Piccadilly, Regent Street and Oxford Street forcing shops to close Lightbulbs filled with ammonia hurled at police officers (By Daily Mail Reporters, Ian Gallagher and George Arbuthnott, Mail Online 27th March 20113) It is a tried and tested strategy of misdirection. How can such misdirection be countered? This work, I think, is achieved not in the protest nor in the work that makes a protest possible. For me, the clue is to be found in Mouffes (1993) contention that democracy is both an unfinished and unfinishable revolution. It is to be found in Frasers view that (2007) for emancipation as the basis for social justice to take root: justice requires social arrangements that permit all members to participate in social interaction on a par with one another. So that means they must be able to participate as peers in all the major forms of social interaction: whether it's politics, whether it's the labour market, whether it's family life and so on. It is further found in Balibars (1994) conception of the co-extensiveness of freedom and equality that he calls galibert (equaliberty) as fundamental to democracy. If there is inequality, then those higher in the hierarchy will override those lower down. This, of course, necessitates a constraint in their freedom and thus produces the conditions for complaints, resentments, and injustice. The work to be accomplished is the creation of an effective public, that is a public that is not crowded out at every turn in every organisation by managerialism, by the privatisation of space, and by a hollowing out of the experience of work itself. The question of how to create the social arrangements that permit all members to participate in social interaction on a par with one another in all the forms of social organisation of everyday life is a supremely educational project allied to the critical methodologies of research to inform the debates of publics. In short, it is about the creation of democratic dispositifs that are able to counter the repressions and manipulations of Power. In everyday life, in our key places of learning, work and play practices necessary to bring about the democratic practices for mutual well being
3

title of the report: Police struggle to control hard-core anarchist rioters after 500,000strong London march against government cuts ends in violence

will need to identify and replace all practices that: tolerate the intolerable that exclude voices that render people invisible that discount disagreements that impose inequalities that restrict freedoms without public debate

More specifically, designing research in alliance with education is about creating the conditions to witness and engage in the emergence of public space. It is not enough when Sharp (2010: 22argues that democracies consist in a multiplicity of groups families, religious organizations, cultural associations, sports clubs, economic institutions, trade unions, student associations, political parties, villages, neighborhood associations, gardening clubs, human rights organizations, musical groups, literary societies, and others. Certainly they may provide countervailing powers to that of a state, but what sort of power? There is no reason to suppose that democratic values will be implemented rather than those of local hierarchies through traditional pedagogies of obedience. Central to the educational and research processes underpinning the creation of countervailing democratic forms of organisation is the return of work as fundamental to the mutual development of peoples powers as a public project. Returning to Dejours re-thinking of the nature of work and its relation to the development of democratic practices, and drawing upon the radical democratic theories (see for example, Laclau 2005, Mouffe 2005, Rancire 2004 ), we can re-think the design of research and educational practices to factor in: how to include the range of voices involved in a given work of research and education how to organise the co-dependencies required to accomplish the work creating a public space of debate and decision making mutually deciding on the rules underlying the practice of debate, decision making and action mutually deciding how to tolerate disagreements and to be faithful to differences (see in particular Rancire 1995) deciding peoples particular contributions according to their powers, that is their talents, their skills, their knowledge, their needs and so on

This I think will construct an ethico-political public space sensitive to differences as valued contributions to the creative powers of the working group (see, for example Critchley 2006). It creates the conditions for public validity, generalisation across public space and the accumulation of public knowledge and intelligence in ways that are socially just. We need, as Moss and Fielding point out (2011) to re-appropriate the lost, the overlooked, the minority histories of such practices to learn from them for the present work of moving beyond protest to the everyday work of embedding democratic practice in all the spheres of life through the continuous work of education and research.

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