Analogies for discourse as plant growth and memory

 

On rereading the theoretical framework of my sugar packet thesis (N.B. I will look for the actually finished version and re-upload it later on) – I’m finding it a lot less woke than I felt when I was writing it. This is in that sense a good thing, that it shows I’ve definitely continued learning since graduating in 2016.

The framework starts by comparing definitions of discourse, which is initially kind of boring but which blossoms in a nice conceptualization of discourse that I still support:

Discourses can stay stable or they can change. A discourse is not a unitary, monolithic “thing”; it consists of all the separate instances and utterances that make it up. Each gesture, posture, picture, object etc. reaffirms or changes existent discourses. The discourse does not exist without the individual utterances, as much as the utterances are meaningless without the discourse: discourse can be seen as the structure of meaning precedents within which new expressions gain and promulgate meaning. The expressions themselves then become new precedents, based on which future expressions can create new meanings.

One thing to note about this concept of discourse is that in every action many different discourses are present simultaneously. Every object in one’s surroundings is the result of a long line of production actions, conversations, development of people's skills; one's body itself is an accumulation of all the discourses it has encountered; the action which one is doing is an interaction with these discourses. The built environment and the other people close by too, are results and part of many intersecting discourses. They have a material existence, but this cannot be seen separately from its semiotic existence.

Next in the chapter I am grappling with a concept of power, starting with some originality of thought by finding that each act or utterance is necessarily a choice for one thing and not for many other possibilities, thereby strengthening or re-empowering the expectation/habituality of this word, object or action as fitting in specific contexts and not strengthening the potential for other possibilities to be adapted in discourse. It’s a good start but it can still be taken a lot further. I am bemused now to find how lightly I touch on the actual violence with which certain narratives are protected and enforced and other suppressed in society – instead dwelling on hypothetical examples of everything else you could call a dog and the dissemination of polka dots. Somehow I managed to write a discussion of power that is hardly critical at all.

Definitely I do agree with my past self that it is good to look at the interaction of the micro workings of power with the macro level; the everyday reiteration and re-enactment of norms being guided by and contributing to a bigger image. There is a large body of normative heritage, the deposit of social expectations built up over millennia: vestiges of e.g. patriarchy, imperialism, religion, racism, but also probably some arguably positive things like transferred values about the joy of celebration, good food, nature, love and care. (I would also count transferred knowledge and skills as part of the normative heritage, though they seem to be “norms” of a different kind: experientially based testable knowledge-norms about successful ways of interacting with materials and other people; physically internalized knowledge of how to move when for instance tatting lace or dissecting a frog.)

I am reading a strange book at the minute which is called De evolutie van het cognitieve vermogen, written under the apparent pseudonym Alias Pyrrho. It contains no references and there is no explanation of what institution the author forms part of; under what “author”-ity are they writing these claims? Fittingly, the book considers the way new knowledge is accepted and internalised.

Sommige kennis is feitelijk en onverbiddelijk hard, andere kennis is zacht of onvolgroeid. Zacht is geloof of de aanname van het waarschijnlijke; onvolgroeid is kennis die (nog) niet ondersteund wordt door een raamwerk van andere kennis waarvan de waarheid vaststaat. Daarom is zachte en onvolgroeide kennis kwetsbaar. (…)

Hoewel de zintuigelijke waarneming het richtpunt is voor feitelijke kennis in vergelijk met wat historisch is vastgelegd, valt het vermogen te kunnen zien en beoordelen wat dit waard is, onder de macht van de subcultuur: de acceptatie van evidenties binnen een sociale of wetenschappelijke gemeenschap. (…) Een filter waarin de hang naar gerespecteerde acceptatie groot is, waardoor we liever de macht van het culturele gelijk mijden, dan dat we de confrontatie aangaan. Kennis is noch vrij van waarden, noch vrij van sociale acceptatie.

[Some knowledge is factual and inexorably hard, other knowledge is soft and not yet full-grown. Soft is the knowledge that is not (yet) supported by a framework of other knowledge of which the truth is established. That is why soft and undeveloped knowledge is vulnerable. (…)

While sensory perception is the focus of factual knowledge as compared to what has been recorded historically, the ability to see and judge its worth falls under the power of the subculture: the acceptance of the evident within a social or scientific community. (…) A filter in which there is a strong desire for respected acceptance, so that we prefer to avoid the power of what is culturally true, rather than confront it. Knowledge is neither free from values nor free from social acceptance.]

So new knowledge is evaluated based on how well it slots in with existent knowledge both in the individual brain and in the social context of the person or in society at large. I like these descriptions because they fit well with a metaphor for memory that I often think about, where it grows in the mind like a plant. Early acquired certainties form the constituent understanding of the world that new information and modes of thinking develop out of and branch off from, using and strengthening the formerly learned and thereby forming a hardening stem. I am thinking of my Christmas cactus, of which the once soft green shoots at the bottom have now become strong hard channels for the nutritients going up to the fresh foliage at the outer tips of the branches. (Tell me in the comments about your early constituent knowledge.)

But what if your early constituent certainties later turn out to be misguided or unhelpful – as often happens? Say you were raised with rigid ideas about gender roles, poverty, class, God, STEM superiority, status – to name a few! To cut down the stem and let the cutting grow roots in new soil can be a very hard and scary process. Because the old certainties are what everything else is held up by, it destabilizes your worldview, revealing or causing insecurity of all that you hold to be true in your everyday life; pushing for a new fundament. It is a deep but rejuvenating unlearning.

What I want to think about now is how such an unlearning can (and does) take place at a much bigger scale – how can we cut down the sequoia trees of the macro vestiges of societal knowledge? At this point my housemate Frank might critically interject and interrogate my stretchy extension of the metaphor (he has done this a couple of times now and I really appreciate it – very critically tittilating.) I am aware that for one, I am severely conflating knowledge, discourse and power. I am also loosely applying the inner workings of the mind to not only plant growth but also the way that knowledge is formed in society at large. I have little basis to show that this is truly so other than that to me it has been a useful and productive analogy, and quite a poetic one.

So if we want to cut down, or take cuttings of, the tree of patriarchy, societally unlearn imperialism; is it like a plant trying to be intentional about where it will grow to next? Like a monstera trying to take a cutting of itself?

The University and the World Out There

Egon Schiele, Stein on the Danube, 1913 

 

A reflection on the class and text “From Unwanted to So-Called Expertise:

Ideologizing Sociolinguistics in Mainstream Media” by Jürgen Jaspers.

Written 21 April 2016

For the visit of Jürgen Jaspers the professors decided on a set-up whereby he would start the class by talking about his own trajectory, as tried and tested at the Mondorf conference. Some of the academics who have been asked to talk about themselves at such length in front of our class have reflected on it as saying it was somewhat unprecedented and weird for them (I would use the word onwennig in Dutch). Yet I think it is a great idea, as we are all about to launch into our post-academic or continuation-academic careers, and it helps greatly to know what choices led people to where they are. Moreover, it is interesting to see how their interests develop over time. 

The first question he tried to answer about his trajectory that I find interesting to discuss here, is: Why did he take the decision to stay in academia? He said that about ten years ago he had decided he wanted to get out of the university world. He undertook some steps to get extra education (theatre teacher training) so as to be able to find non-academic work, but then found that in doing so he was still thinking about the same academic questions. He ended up realising it wasn’t so bad in academia after all, though I didn’t fully get why he came to that conclusion – maybe he just found out the theatre world was just as bad. 

I’ve also been thinking that I want to move out of academia. I have been in some form of education or another since I was 3 or even before that in the crèche. Increasingly it starts to feel problematic – there seems to be a big gap between the university and the people not in university; there is a lot of internal competition in the university which is not per se promoting a thorough approach to science; academics are often in insecure jobs with a lot of stress; and it’s all to write studies that are hardly read by the rest of the world. (-> Jaspers said that with all of our class reading his papers, his readership was suddenly ten times as big). 

I am starting to see that the university is a system to reproduce privilege, with or at the cost of the individual researchers who are just dedicated to their topic. This is partially a linguistic point: through teaching the students the correct language and formats to write their academic texts in, certain forms of knowledge are empowered: if you write it like this it has status, it has to be taken serious. Yet as always it is a selective process, of inclusion and exclusion: the texts not written like that are not seen as valid knowledge. About this Jaspers himself said a nice quotable quote, “If we don’t produce failed students we don’t recognize the ones who are successful”. In other words, by defining conditions for success you are automatically setting up a process of inclusion and exclusion. He said another thing, while talking about how sociolinguists are seen as hippies who don’t believe in norms, namely that he does believe in “some” norms but he just wants ones that aren’t exclusive. I was wondering about that (maybe I should have asked on but I felt I’d already said a lot) – do non-exclusive norms actually exist? What is his understanding of “norms”? Because maybe it is in the basis of a “norm” that it creates a division of people who do and who do not act accordingly. Either way, it feels like it’s time for me to step out of the university and find out if everything in the world reproduces privilege, or if there are ways to stop reproducing it. 

In his text about the challenges of communication between academics and journalists, Jaspers is thinking about how an academic, as an expert on a particular issue, can take agency over the discourse on their topic and get the story “out there”, the way they think about it. Firstly, it demonstrates the gap between what the people at the university are doing and the way the outside world perceives them – or in fact the way the academics perceive the “outside world”. In this case, the “outside world” believes that Standard Dutch should be taught at schools and that youths on the street are speaking a new language out of respect for foreign newcomers. Jaspers’ story actually contradicts my point in the previous paragraph in that sense, that the journalists and the people writing letters to the newspaper and whoever else reacted are not in fact taking his text as the authority that he wants it to be. They think of him as a hippie, he says, an arrogant Antwerpenaar in an ivory tower without a shred of sense of reality. The privilege reproduction of the university is apparently not carrying over into his statements actually being taken as more valid knowledge than lay sociolinguistics. This could be an issue of the discipline itself. 

The question of how you can change a discourse as an individual is one that I think is very important. Of course every time you say something that challenges the status quo, you are changing the discourse in a small way: that opinion, that way of viewing things has now been uttered and is in that sense “existent”; there is not nobody who thinks that. But it is not micro-changes we are after: the question is how one individual point of view can be spread and become more of a mainstream view (rather than that of hippies in an ivory tower).

I asked Jaspers what he thought was the best way to promote one’s view or how to take agency over the discourse. He said the most important thing is to seek a basis of other people who agree. A micro-scale change can gather momentum, ever more people join and eventually the dominant system topples in favour of the new idea (In this aspect his ideas were clearly influenced by Blommaert and chaos theory, I thought). His example of how that works in practice, that he gave later, was that instead of talking to the journalist one-on-one, after which they publish an article (the academic is taken into the world of the press) it could be better to invite the journalist to the academic conference, where under the enjoyment of some Pain de Surprise and nice free wine, the journalist is taken into the world of academics: the whole research team is there and they all think the same way, so that the academic’s weird ivory tower assertions are suddenly the normal situation and the journalist is the outlier. 

Professor Budach also suggested ways of toppling the system: she said that rather than talk to journalists or try to lobby politicians about new approaches to sociolinguistics, she had found it more rewarding to talk directly to the teachers, who are right at the place of implementation of the language policies. When they are convinced by new ideas, they can bring them directly into practice. When politicians are convinced by new ideas (when and if), they still have to elbow their way through the hedge of opposition and checks and balances before a shred of the original idea can find its way into policy, which then still has to be communicated with those who are to implement it – exactly – the teachers – presumably already tired of so many attempts to regulate their behaviour from the top. 

In summary, this article and class led me to ponder the reproduction of privilege, the exclusionary nature of norms, the perpetuation of discourse, and ways of toppling it and replacing it with one’s own perspective. I think that’s a quare lot for two pages and will therefore leave it at this.

Duizenden onderzoeken naar onderwijs in één keer

Er zijn online een aantal fascinerende tools beschikbaar die voortvloeien uit de "what works"-beweging - met het idee dat je door zoveel mogelijk onderzoek overzichtelijk samen te brengen, in één oogopslag kan zien wat er bewezen resultaat heeft en wat niet. Een heel goed voorbeeld daarvan is deze Teaching and Learning Toolkit van het Education Endowment Fund.

Wat je op die pagina ziet is een samenvatting van een aantal verschillende maatregelen die in het onderwijs worden toegepast (het gaat hierbij om basis- en voortgezet onderwijs). Per maatregel wordt aangegeven hoeveel die kost om in de praktijk te brengen, hoe solide het beschikbare onderzoek over dat onderwerp is, en de verwachtte impact van die maatregel gegeven in maanden vooruitgang die daarmee geboekt worden ten opzichte van kinderen die de maatregel niet hebben gehad. Als je op de maatregel klikt zie je uitleg en een aantal dingen om te overwegen bij de implementatie.

Een aantal dingen vallen op. Er zijn maar twee maatregelen die een bewezen negatieve impact hebben, maar allebei worden die in Nederland veelvuldig toegepast. De meest dramatische daarvan is doubleren, waarvan aangegeven wordt dat het heel veel kost, dat leerlingen die blijven zitten hun peers die wel overgaan nooit meer in kunnen halen, en dat het ongelijkheid vergroot. Het advies dat EEF geeft is om in plaats van doubleren andere methoden in te zetten die goedkoper zijn, zoals één-op-één-begeleiding. (Nog meer info: een artikel hierover in de Tubantia en een verdiepende uitleg op Wij-leren.nl)

De andere maatregel met negatieve impact is wat hier wordt omschreven als "Setting" en "streaming", wat inhoudt dat mensen worden ingedeeld in klassen op basis van hun niveau - in Amerika heb je bijvoorbeeld "gewone" Algebra II en Algebra II Honours, en in Nederland een nog veel extremer model met vmbo, havo en vwo. Volgens het EEF heeft dat wel een klein positief effect voor mensen die sowieso al hoge resultaten halen, maar ook een klein negatief effect voor mensen die middelhoge of lage resultaten halen. Gemiddeld heeft het dus een klein negatief effect, met name ook op het zelfvertrouwen en op mensen hun groeimentaliteit: het idee dat je resultaten kan veranderen door moeite te doen. Het advies van EEF is om de leerlingen hoogstens binnen de klas in groepjes in te delen die dan aparte instructie krijgen. Daarnaast is er met meer op de leerling gestuurde instructie, in plaats van klassikaal onderwijs, sowieso veel terrein te winnen. (klik haha) (Tevens een kritische noot hiero, op basis waarvan de EEF hun informatie naar het schijnt heeft aangepast)

Maatregelen die wel een heel positief effect hebben zijn het geven van feedback (ligt voor de hand), specifieke instructie over leerstrategieën (leren leren) en begrijpend lezen en alles wat daarmee te maken heeft (literacy). Maar het is interessant om te zien dat de overgrote meerderheid van de onderzochte initiatieven een positieve impact heeft.

Onderzoek zoals dit is gaaf: het kan dat dit nu pas echt mogelijk is, nu er over veel maatschappelijke onderwerpen enkele tientallen jaren aan onderzoek is gedaan wat met elkaar vergeleken kan worden. Ik ben benieuwd of het ministerie van OCW in Nederland ook bekend is met dit soort resultaten en of er binnen het Nederlandse systeem wat mee gedaan gaat worden.

Transparency across the divide

http://vaperforms.virginia.gov/

http://www.gov.scot/About/Performance/scotPerforms
Edit 18/05/2020: Now to be found at https://nationalperformance.gov.scot/

The above two links show the accountability and transparency initiatives of the Scottish and the Virginian State governments. I am heavily impressed by these initiatives. The idea is to choose a number of broad goals that everyone agrees on as target outcomes for the government, e.g. that people are more healthy; then to divide the broad target outcome into more specific aims - e.g. access to health services should be easy, people should smoke and drink less, there should be awareness of mental health issues - and then a number of specific, measurable indicators are chosen to show progress towards these aims - e.g. average waiting time in the A&E room or for a gyneacologist appointment; amount of cigarettes and alcohol sold on average per month per 1000 inhabitants; I am just coming up with random examples here when in fact you should look for yourself on the website. The point to take home is that it is a complete upheaval of the way that governing is thought about.

In Northern Ireland at the minute they are thinking about setting up something not dissimilar, called Outcomes Based Accountability. I think it's a very interesting initiative because it could be seen as an attempt to depoliticise politics. Instead of focusing on the heavy symbol politics regarding flags and language legislation that normally goes on, the focus is shifted to these goals that are so generally desirable that even Sinn Fein and the DUP do not disagree about them. A whole army of statisticians and social researchers finds employ in deciding on good indicators and diligently measuring their progress. Then the debate, in this fantasy future Northern Ireland, is about why the indicators did not go up, and what measures could be taken to make them go up in the future. No more symbol politics needed, unless it in some way is relevant to the indicators at hand.

N.B. I wrote the above a while ago. In fact then, as now, the Northern Irish government is non-existent, let alone actively setting up any new form of accountability. They've recently taken over the record for longest period without a sitting government from Belgium. This while Northern Ireland plays such a key role in the Brexit negotiations - of which all I can say is that based on the information available to me, my mind has decided it is a botched process. Alas, I have exiled myself from the Northwestern-European Archipelago, in search of better work opportunities there where the statisticians already have a firm grip on politics.

Edit January 2018: Here's a blog written on the topic by Aongus O'Keeffe of Inspiring Impact NI, about the factors that need to be in place to transfer to outcomes-based governance.

Social impact reporting: Business vs Charities

When my mother told Klaus about my intention to start measuring the impact of charities, his reaction was, according to her, to say that he does not understand why there is such a pressure on charities in particular to evidence their social impact - the difference they make to their beneficiaries and to society as a whole, taking into account the positive effects as well as the potential negative ones. He said that there is not as much pressure on businesses to research what impact they make (in fact there is legislation saying businesses need to account for social impact as well, on which Deloitte is heavily cashing in). But indeed the idea of social return on investment and public benefit reporting seems to be mainly a matter in the voluntary, charity and social enterprise (VCSE) sector. Is this an unfair set-up? Why should the pressure to showcase doing good be higher on those explicitly and selflessly trying to do good, charities that have to go on their knees for every penny and cannot afford a whole lot of overhead expenses, than it is on ventures that are primarily intended to make profit, and that might therefore be more likely to have a negative social impact?

My argument in response to my mother was that rather than seeing this as an unfair situation, it could be reframed as charities taking the lead on social impact, and businesses slowly following after them. Making a social difference has always been the stuff of charities; it is what they are for and what they have expertise about. For for-profit ventures it makes sense to think in terms of finances, as the maximization thereof is the expressed purpose. Finances are kept track of through numbers and excel sheets, but while you can count some aspects of charity services (do people keep coming back?) if you want to know what difference the users have experienced due to the services offered, you will eventually wind up having to ask them. In that way it makes more sense for a charity to have a qualitative approach to measuring their impact. They are normally closely in touch with the people they are attempting to help. For large businesses, however, being in close touch with the customer and having the ability to receive dihrect input and feedback is something that has come as a side effect of the development of the internet. It is something that they are only figuring out now. And on this journey, charities can serve an exemplary function.


An example of a cool project regarding social impact: homelessnessimpact.org
They are bringing together information about the impact of different initiatives regarding homelessness, to figure out what works to actually help people, so that everyone can concentrate on doing those things that help, and we can cut any initiatives that do not actually make a difference and/or that make people feel worse.

Evaluation of the languages in the Master

Now that I have finished the Master (Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts), and the experience has already started greying out in my mind, it seems like the right time - or the last possible time at least - to write a blog post I had been intending to write, evaluating how I experienced it. Particularly I would like to evaluate some of the practical elements of how the multilingualism so proudly announced in the Master's name and on its website, actually plays out in and around the classroom and the student residences.

Entrance requirements
The Master is trilingual in English, French and German, and when I applied it was specified that you have to have C1 level English and B2 in at least one of the other two languages. Classes are taught in one or more of the three languages, and most of the staff is at least bilingual as well. It was also stated, however, that the degree is not a language learning course, although it included some language classes in the programme.

One of the first points to make here is about those specific language requirements. Because of the way English proficiency is obligatory, but aside from that you can choose either French or German, English is already effectively the lingua franca before the course has even started; through this requirement it is assured that English will be the language everyone has in common.

Teaching multilingually
The way that the classes worked is they were mostly taught in two out of the three languages, usually either French and English or German and English. There were also some ambitious teachers who taught in all three. I think the teachers were explicitly encouraged to make their classes multilingual. The actual balance between the languages differed per class, depending mainly on the teacher's choice of strategy but also on the students' input.

There were for instance teachers who tried switching between the languages while lecturing (the ones really dedicated to the multilingual ideal); teachers who mostly lectured in english but who presented case studies in other languages, with or without paraphrase; and teachers who mostly taught in French or in German but who might occasionally switch to English to accommodate student questions. Often the first class of a course would be more multilingual than the last one, as the teacher realises some of the students cannot follow the class well because their German or French comprehension skills are lacking, or because the students keep asking questions and discussing in English, so that the teacher starts to accommodate. That said I also had classes where students would make a genuine effort to make contributions in the class language, sometimes going so far as to speak it amongst ourselves. I had a few classmates and friends with whom I'd speak German, even though it was neither of our first language - I'm thinking of girls from Romania, Slovakia and China respectively (hi!).

I generally tried to pick classes in all three of the languages every semester, so choosing classes not just based on what I found most interesting, but also making sure I'd have at least a bit of French input. My French comprehension really isn't at an academic level though, as I found out while sitting through lecture after lecture in fast French. I eventually zone out, however hard I am trying to pay attention. If I do my best I will get a sense of what the teacher is saying, but I can't follow the specifics unless they talk slowly and give me some time to let it sink in or look up some words after every line. Powerpoints can help, but they can be distracting too, as you are trying to translate the info on the slides while also trying to follow what the teacher is saying. Somehow, with some teamwork and some bluffing, I did manage to get alright grades for these classes, but I haven't retained very much of what they were actually talking about.

The course as a language learning environment
That brings me onto the next topic, namely that the course wasn't intended to be a language learning course, but rather a multilingual way to deliver a humanities research course. The experience of multilingualism was part of the experience the course directors aimed for us to have, but greater fluency wasn't one of the outcomes on which students were evaluated. Yet almost everyone who chose to do the course, did so hoping to improve their language skills. At the start of the course, some intensive language classes were offered at beginner and intermediate level. I took French intermediate, so my 3rd language of the three course languages. I think people generally chose to do these courses in the course language that they were weakest in. The course I did was fun and it helped me to figure out some French past tenses and the like. In two weeks you are not going to reach fluency and I don't think that was the hope of the course designers. I know that some other students got quite annoyed with their beginner language courses, either because they found German too hard or because they didn't get along with the teacher. The intensive language courses were fairly separate from the rest of the degree and were not explicitly followed up on in the rest of the courses, which might be a tip, to integrate them more through e.g. reflection on how much you can learn in this way, which methods seemed to be most productive and so on.
 
The way the assignments worked is you were allowed to write them in any of the languages that the teacher felt confident marking in - so normally the stated course languages, but I suppose if you had another language in common with the teacher you could write it in that. (I never tried this but I seem to recall that the Luxembourgish students wrote something in Luxembourgish.)

Now, writing an assignment for university is hard in any language. Mostly every sentence costs a lot of thought and effort. You need to make sure your argument makes perfect sense, your explanations are well-written and sensible, your sources are quoted in relevant ways. But there is a lot of time pressure and you're also working on a few other assignments. Little surprise, then, that students do not venture to write in languages that they aren't very confident in. My German is at a fairly high level - I used to talk to my boss in German, I can maintain a long and nuanced conversation, albeit with some wrong inflections, I know words like ausbilden and eintrichteren and I know you can call money Mäuse. But academic writing is absolutely a skill apart. The teachers are aware that it is, and the course does offer classes in academic writing in French, German and English. I took the German one and enjoyed it, but it was a bit intimidating that I was doing the same assignments as the native speakers who were in the class with me (why they didn't take the French class instead is beyond me).

I think that the course could have developed its facilities for the students to develop their languages more, importantly by explicitly rewarding students for writing an assignment in another language. I suggested this to the course coordinators and they felt it would be hard to enforce this - as it would mean differentiating between a German native speaker writing in German, and a Greek person writing in German; or even between a Greek person who has lived in Germany before and a Greek person who hasn't; the implementation would be either quite subjective, or very complicated.

Thoughts on feminism on this 8th of march

In San José del Palmar, Mariana told me she could see children practising for the marching band parade. The girls had roses. Whatever holiday it is, she said, in San José del Palmar there is always a marching band parade to celebrate it - even when its oddly military character seems to clash with the idea of the holiday.

In Belfast tonight my brother attended the Women's Poetry night at the Intercontinental, coordinated by Daryl with her bright purple hair and a cup with a bike bell on the handle that she puts the names of the readers in. I stayed home to do my maths exercises. Titus cooked dinner for us before leaving and turned up just in time for the last poem.

Last night we were in the Intercontinental too, then for the vegan night; at some point I was stood in the back where the Feminist Living Library is. There are thirty odd books on feminism there, and readers are invited to leaf through and if they feel anything is outdated, to write their updates in the margins. I think it's a great idea, if quite work-intensive on a night out; but it's participative and creative. Helen stood there with a book called Cunt: A Declaration of Independence (by Inga Muscio) and said that she had read most of it and it really challenged her preconceptions. There were two men sitting at the little round table beneath her, clutching the flowery tablecloth and looking petrified. Maybe I am just projecting, but I thought they looked petrified.

It's part of growing up as a woman these days that you have to find your own definition of what feminism means to you. In fact I think it should be part of growing up as a man, too. Feminism is a pretty outdated name by now. I would like to write in its margin: the breaking down of gender roles, stereotypes and expectations, and allowing everyone to figure out what they like for themselves.