̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - belief

Brexit and Trump voters more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, survey study shows

fpjl2 — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 07:51:34 +0000

̽��ֱ��largest cross-national study ever conducted on conspiracy theories suggests that around a third of people in countries such as the UK and France think their governments are “hiding the truth” about immigration, and that voting for Brexit and Trump is associated with a wide range of conspiratorial beliefs – from science denial to takeover plots by Muslim migrants.

̽��ֱ��research, conducted as part of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Conspiracy & Democracy project, and based on survey work from the YouGov-Cambridge centre, covers nine countries – US, Britain*, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary – and will be presented at a public launch in Cambridge on Friday 23 November.

According to project researcher Dr Hugo Leal, anti-immigration conspiracy theories have been “gaining ground” since the refugee crisis first came to prominence in 2015. “ ̽��ֱ��conspiratorial perception that governments are deliberately hiding the truth about levels of migration appears to be backed by a considerable portion of the population across much of Europe and the United States,” he said.

In Hungary, where controversial Prime Minister Viktor Orban is regularly accused of stoking anti-migrant sentiment, almost half of respondents (48%) believe their government is hiding the truth about immigration. Germany was the next highest (35%), with France (32%), Britain (30%) and Sweden (29%) also showing high percentages of this conspiracy among respondents, as well as a fifth (21%) of those in the United States.

Close to half of respondents who voted for Brexit (47%) and Trump (44%) believe their government is hiding the truth about immigration, compared with just 14% of Remain voters and 12% of Clinton voters.

̽��ֱ��researchers also set out to measure the extent of belief in a conspiracy theory known as ‘the great replacement’: the idea that Muslim immigration is part of a bigger plan to make Muslims the majority of a country’s population.

“Originally formulated in French far-right circles, the widespread belief in a supposedly outlandish nativist conspiracy theory known as the ‘great replacement’ is an important marker and predictor of the Trump and Brexit votes,” said Leal. Some 41% of Trump voters and 31% of Brexit voters subscribed to this theory, compared with 3% of Clinton voters and 6% of Remain voters.

Researchers also looked at a number of other popular conspiracy theories. Both Trump and Brexit voters were more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax, vaccines are harmful, and that a group of people “secretly control events and rule the world together”. “We found the existence of a conspiratorial worldview linking both electorates,” said Leal.

He describes the levels of science denial as an “alarming global trend”. In general, researchers found the idea that climate change is a hoax to be far more captivating for right-wing respondents, while scepticism about vaccines was less determined by “ideological affiliation”.

̽��ֱ��view that “the truth about the harmful effects of vaccines is being deliberately hidden from the public” ranged from lows of 10% in Britain to a startling quarter of the population – some 26% – in France.

̽��ֱ��conspiracy belief that a secret cabal “control events and rule the world together” varies significantly between European countries such as Portugal (42%) and Sweden (12%). Dr Hugo Drochon, also a researcher on the Leverhulme Trust-funded Conspiracy & Democracy project, suggests this has "public policy implications, because there are structural issues at play here too”.

“More unequal countries with a lower quality of democracy tend to display higher levels of belief in the world cabal, which suggests that conspiracy beliefs can also be addressed at a more ‘macro’ level,” said Drochon.

̽��ֱ��research team assessed the levels of “conspiracy scepticism” by looking at those who refuted every conspiratorial view in the study. Sweden had the healthiest levels of overall conspiracy scepticism, with 48% rejecting every conspiracy put to them. ̽��ֱ��UK also had a relatively strong 40% rejection of all conspiracies. Hungary had the lowest, with just 15% of people not taken in by any conspiracy theories.

Half of both Remain and Clinton voters were conspiracy sceptics, while 29% of Brexit voters and just 16% of Trump voters rejected all conspiracy theories.

̽��ֱ��question of trust, and which professions the public see as trustworthy, was also investigated by researchers. Government and big business came out worst across all countries included in the study. Roughly three-quarters of respondents in Italy, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Britain say they distrusted government ministers and company CEOs. Distrust of journalists, trade unionists, senior officials of the EU, and religious leaders are also high in all surveyed countries.

Trust in academics, however, was still relatively high, standing at 57% in the US and 64% in Britain. “We hope these findings can provide incentive for academics to reclaim a more active role in the public sphere, particularly when it comes to illuminating the differences between verifiable truths and demonstrable falsehoods,” said Hugo Leal.

Apart from academics, only family and friends escape the general climate of distrust, with trust reaching levels between 80% and 90% in all countries. Leal argues that this might help explain the credibility assigned to “friend mediated” online social networks.

In all surveyed countries apart from Germany, about half the respondents got their news from social media, with Facebook the preferred platform followed by YouTube. Getting news from social media was less likely to be associated with complete scepticism of conspiracy theories – much less likely in countries such as the US and Italy.

Researchers found that consuming news from YouTube in particular was associated with the adoption of particular conspiratorial views, such as anti-vaccine beliefs in the US and climate change denial in Britain.

“A telling takeaway of the study is that conspiracy theories are, nowadays, mainstream rather than marginal beliefs,” said Leal. “These findings provide important clues to understanding the popularity of populist and nationalist parties contesting elections across much of the western world."

̽��ֱ��survey was conducted by YouGov during 13-23 August 2018, with a total sample size of 11,523 adults and results then weighted to be “representative of each market”.

* Northern Ireland was not included in the survey.

Latest research reveals the extent to which conspiracy theories have become “mainstream rather than marginal beliefs” across much of Europe and the US.

These findings provide important clues to understanding the popularity of populist and nationalist parties

Hugo Leal

Gage Skidmore

Donald Trump speaking at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference. Some 44% of Trump voters were found to believe their government is hiding the truth about immigration, according to researchers.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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̽��ֱ��Reformation is remembered

amb206 — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 09:53:27 +0000

On 31 October 1517, almost 500 years ago, an event occurred that sparked a religious schism across Europe, one that was to see Catholicism challenged not by outsiders but by insiders unhappy with what they perceived as the abuses and corruption of the medieval church.

̽��ֱ��nailing of Martin Luther’s 95 theses to a church door in the small German town of Wittenberg is embedded in legend. Scholars now question whether this episode actually occurred. But there is no doubt that a movement took hold that changed the face of Christian belief and has left lasting legacies in our culture.

To mark the anniversary of the Reformation, a team of historians from Cambridge and York Universities has been looking afresh at the ways in which the fragmentation of Christendom has been framed over the centuries –and the way belief intertwined with gender, politics and much more.

̽��ֱ��cross-curricular project brought together historians Professor Alex Walsham and Dr Ceri Law from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and literary scholars Professor Brian Cummings and Dr Bronwyn Wallace from the ̽��ֱ�� of York. ̽��ֱ��researchers were able to draw on the remarkable archives and libraries of the two institutions plus Lambeth Palace Library.

Both York and Cambridge are cities deeply affected by the Reformation. In Cambridge, events staged at Great St Mary's church this weekend will tell the shocking story of two foreign Protestant theologians who held academic posts in Cambridge during the reign of Edward VI. ̽��ֱ��disinterred bodies of Martin Bucer and Peter Phagius were publically burnt in Cambridge market square in 1557.

̽��ֱ��creation of an outstanding online exhibition, hosted by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library, makes the pioneering work by the team’s scholars accessible to all. ̽��ֱ��exhibition breaks what is often regarded as a hard-to-grasp topic into accessible themes and, with the aid of stunning images, creates a vivid portrait of life, love and death in the 16th century and beyond.

Walsham says: “Our exhibition explores how the Reformation transformed traditional modes of remembering and involved concerted attempts at forgetting, as well as the ways in which it created a rich and vibrant memory culture of its own.”

̽��ֱ��Reformation was complex and far-reaching, taking the form of many Reformations. In simplest terms, it was an upheaval that shattered Catholic Europe and paved the way for separate movements and responses to orthodoxy.

Luther was a university professor and preacher. His theses challenged a system called the sale of indulgences whereby people could reduce punishment after death for their sins and spend a shorter period in purgatory – a sort of ‘clearing house’ for heaven.

Luther’s followers – Protestants – hit out at many of the rituals of medieval Christianity. Religion before the Reformation has been described as ‘a religion of the body’. At the mass, all five senses came into play. ̽��ֱ��priest conveyed the mystery of the rite through a combination of different manual and bodily actions, including kissing the book and raising the host.

For the laity, this visual experience was compounded by the sound of bells, the smell of incense, the sight of candles, the touching of hands, the taste of offerings, in a synaesthesia of devotion. Prayer was centred on bodily actions, whether of prostration or of counting prayers on a rosary.

̽��ֱ��Reformation called many of these actions into question by labelling them forms of ‘superstition’ and ‘idolatry’. ̽��ֱ��Reformed liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549 abolished many aspects of bodily ritual such as the elevation of the host. And yet, the Protestant liturgy provided for scriptural ritual such as washing with water in baptism and laying on of hands in ordination.

Protestantism also accepted kneeling as a sign of devotion or of penitence as well as signing with the cross as a sign of God’s covenant with his people. These actions continued to cause controversy and dissent throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. ̽��ֱ��1549 Book of Common Prayer still included an exorcism in baptism; but in 1552 it was removed.

Religious change impacted profoundly not only on collective and national ways of viewing the past, but on the ways that individual men and women saw their own narratives and the ways in which they recorded the lives of their families and friends. Numerous real voices find a platform in the Remembering the Reformation exhibition.

Family life was changing as Protestant clergy were allowed to marry. Among the voices that come through are those of Tobie Matthew and his wife Frances. An 18^th century copy of a diary kept by Tobie Matthew records his preaching from 1583, when he became dean of Durham, to 1622. In this time he gave 1,992 sermons.

̽��ֱ��diary offers a rare and valuable insight into patterns and selections of sermon topics from the court to parishes. It contains glimpses of the personal as Matthew notes his movements, career and the illnesses and misfortunes that befell him. On 24 March 1603 he heads his entry with ‘Eheu! Eheu!’ – an expression of despair at the death of Elizabeth I.

A document in the hand of Tobie’s wife Frances (1550/1-1629) reflects a deeply personal aspect of their lives. She lists for posterity ‘ ̽��ֱ��birthe of all my children’, including the place, date and time of birth, and details of godparents. She decided later to add the details of the deaths of the four out of six children who died before adulthood.

In doing so, Frances created a poignant record of loss. Of her son, Samuell Matthew, she notes: “This Samuell Matthew, my most Deerly-Beloved sonne, departed this life of Christianity the 15 of June 1601, and is buryed in Peeter-house in cambridge.” ̽��ֱ��phrase ‘this life of Christianity’ is telling: belief was not just an adjunct to life but its central purpose.

̽��ֱ��document also bears testament to a phenomenon created by the Reformation: the clerical family. Frances was the daughter of a bishop and married into two episcopal families. Her first husband was son of Matthew Parker, the first Elizabethan archbishop of Canterbury. After he died, she married Tobie Matthew.

Reformers celebrated the ideal of such ‘godly’ families. But even such a strong Protestant pedigree as Frances’s brought no guarantees. Her son Toby (1577-1655) converted to Catholicism, much to the distress of both his parents. Religious differences were destined to continue to divide as well as unite.

Walsham says: “People were deeply divided by faith as a result of the Reformation and memory was at the heart of the ways in which it fragmented society and challenged the ties of affection that bound families together. But remembering the medieval and Protestant past was also a mechanism for cementing powerful identities.”

‘Remembering the Reformation’, an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project, is generously funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (http://rememberingthereformation.org.uk/).

̽��ֱ��Reformation is famously traced to an event that took place in Germany 500 years ago and reverberated across Europe. An online exhibition paints a vivid portrait of a society undergoing profound change – and free events this weekend commemorate an episode of corpse burning in Cambridge.

Our exhibition explores how the Reformation transformed traditional modes of remembering and involved concerted attempts at forgetting, as well as the ways in which it created a rich and vibrant memory culture of its own.

Alex Walsham

Wikimedia Commons

̽��ֱ��bodies of two Protestants, Martin Bucer and Peter Phagius, are burnt in Cambridge's market place, 1557

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Remedies for infertility: how performative rituals entered early medical literature

amb206 — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 09:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��medicalisation of life’s beginnings and endings has not diminished the human need for ritual. Earlier this month a photograph of a newborn baby still attached to his mother’s placenta, with the umbilical cord arranged to spell the word ‘love’, was posted on the web. ̽��ֱ��image, by an Australian photographer, went viral. ̽��ֱ��online discussion drew attention to the age-old Maori tradition of returning the placenta to the land and to the many rituals still associated with childbirth around the world.

While many birthing traditions are passed on orally, others entered the realms of literature well before the advent of printing. One of the many treasures among the manuscripts belonging to Pembroke College, Cambridge is a compendium of medical and surgical knowledge written by Gilbertus Anglicus (Gilbert the Englishman) around the middle of the 13th century. ̽��ֱ��text is titled Compendium medicine and is written in a near contemporary hand in two columns, probably by a scribe from the south of France.

Later in the same century, this manuscript (now kept in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library) found its way to England. We know this because there are notes made by an owner writing in an English hand. ̽��ֱ��Latin text of Gilbertus’s Compendium medicine was the first great survey of medical knowledge to have been assembled after the arrival of Greek and Arabic texts in Western Europe, and was tremendously popular. It represents a key source for historians of medical knowledge in the Middle Ages.

Particularly fascinating for historians interested in the communication of practical medical knowledge are additions to the text written in the margins of the Pembroke manuscript (MS 169). Some of these “postscripts” are valuable evidence for how orally transmitted traditions gradually entered written records – and became embedded in later copies of medical texts.

At the bottom of a page of the manuscript is an empericum (remedy) neatly written in the margin, perhaps even by Gilbertus himself, soon after the original text was compiled. It sets out, in considerable detail, a prescription for the treatment of sterility that “never fails” (“qui numquam fallit”). This personal witness to the remedy’s success (“through this treatment by our hand many who were thought to be sterile conceived”) inspired someone to add the remedy in the margin of a manuscript written at some expense by a professional scribe.

Other entries in the margins of Compendium medicine credit remedies to “a soldier”, or “a Saracen”, but scholars don’t know who told Gilbertus this particular empericum.

To summarise the remedy: a man aged 20 years or more should, at a precisely designated hour and while reciting the Lord’s prayer, pull from the ground two plants (comfrey and daisy) and extract their juices. These juices should be used to inscribe the words of a well-known directive from Genesis (“ ̽��ֱ��Lord said: Increase and multiply and fill the earth”), together with some magical names, on an amulet to be worn during sexual intercourse. If the verse is worn by the man, the union will produce a boy, if by the woman, a girl.

In subsequent copies of Gilbertus’s Compendium medicine, the same prescription appears in the main body of the author’s text, and so it found its way into print in the 16th century. Its later readers would have had no idea that this remedy was not part of the original version and may have first circulated by word of mouth.

In an article published in a special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Peter Murray Jones and Lea Olsan (Department of History and Philosophy of Science) draw on dozens of examples from manuscripts circulating in England between 900 and 1500 to show how medieval men and women used performative rituals to negotiate the dangers and difficulties of conception and childbirth.

Charms, prayers, amulets and prayer-rolls played important roles within the sphere of human reproduction at a time when male impotence or infertility, and the perils of childbirth, were not just matters of personal anxiety but vitally affected the legality of marriage and the inheritance of land or noble status.

Jones and Olsan illustrate, through their analysis of surviving documentation, the ways in which performative rituals combine spoken words and actions which drew on Christian liturgy, the intercession of saints, as well as occult symbols and powers to protect mothers and children or to ensure fertility. Repeated use of the rituals added to their force. Some were extremely long-lived, but at different times might involve different actors – monks, priests, or friars as well as local healers, midwives, doctors or the lay owners of remedy books.

One of the earliest and most important of the sources for these rituals is the Trotula collection of texts – a compendium of women’s medicine dating from the 12th century when it was collated in Salerno (Italy), and later assumed to have been written by a female physician.

Drawing on a detailed study of this collection by historian Monica Green, Jones and Olsan cite three rituals to facilitate a delayed birth or expel a dead fetus. One such remedy, for difficult birth, requires the woman to eat the sator arepo tenet opera rotas palindrome (a phrase that could be written out as a magic square of letters) written in butter or cheese. A second specifies a string of letters, this time to be drunk with the milk of another woman. A third ritual employs the skin of a snake as a birthing girdle, to be tied around the mother-to-be.

This special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine was edited by members of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge (Nick Hopwood, Peter Murray Jones, Lauren Kassell and Jim Secord).Their introduction explains how important the whole business of communication has been to the history of reproduction. ̽��ֱ��other articles in the issue explore communication and reproduction from a variety of angles and in different periods. See the Q&A at the JHU Press blog.

̽��ֱ��special issue springs from a larger Cambridge project that looks at the long-term shifts in understandings and practices of reproduction. Funded by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award, the historians involved in this ‘Generation to Reproduction’ programme are offering fresh perspectives on issues ranging from ancient fertility rites to IVF. They are thus reassessing the history of reproduction over the long term.

A study of one of the most important medieval texts devoted to women’s medicine has opened a window into the many rituals associated with conception and childbirth. Research into the shifting communication of knowledge contributes to a wider project looking at the history of reproduction from ‘magical’ practices right through to IVF.

By permission of the Master and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge

̽��ֱ��"empericum that never fails" in the margin of the Compendium of Gilbertus Anglicus. ̽��ֱ��instructions are for making and applying an amulet for conception.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Can a scientist be religious?

lw355 — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 08:50:24 +0000

An empirical answer to the question “can a scientist be religious” is easy: yes. Religious scientists are actually quite common. However, many would prefer to know whether or not it is rational for them to be religious. Here we need some qualifications on what exactly ‘religious’ means. If it requires belief in an omnipotent, human-like entity who interferes in the workings of nature, suspending a law here or a rigging a miracle there like a mechanic might fix a car, then I’d say no, religion is not rational. Given what we know about our world and cosmos, based on methodologies on which we depend in nearly all aspects of our lives, it’s not rational to believe that stars hang from a metal firmament in the sky, that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that human virgins have sons, or that decomposed cadavers can come back to life.

Most of those who feel committed to their religion are able to reconcile the incompatibility of certain scriptural claims with what they know about our world. Like St Augustine in the 4th century, they understand that in a conflict between our interpretation of human-mediated religious texts and our understanding of natural law, something has to give, and this generally means a change in the former, not the latter.

Relatedly, many recognise that a ‘miracle’ – when defined as a spontaneous failure of natural law – is usually an artefact of ignorance, rather than something intrinsic to an object or event. Sixteenth-century Aztecs made the mistake of elevating their ignorance about Spanish horses and pikemen to the miraculous, a fact that (along with smallpox and some angry neighbours) led to the destruction of their society. Reverence of phenomena because they seem inexplicable today makes the same mistake. Conversely, the vista of the Grand Canyon should not be considered less miraculous because we understand erosion; wine is no less sweet when we know that fermentation intervenes between it and water. In my view, the existence of natural laws, and indeed of rationality itself, is a legitimate basis for worship; ignorance about nature is not.

Charles Darwin is sometimes portrayed as a boon for atheism because he articulated a mechanism by which humanity could no longer pretend to lack a connection with the animal world. We are animals – very peculiar ones to be sure, but animals nonetheless. If your religion demands otherwise, then at least in some particulars it is wrong. It is notable, therefore, how Darwin made it clear in the Origin of Species that “I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one” (1860, p. 482), or in an 1879 letter that “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist... In my most extreme fluctuations have I never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God.” By the end of his life, Darwin apparently did not accept a personal God or the typical Christian explanations for the existence of suffering. Yet, despite frequently being cast as an atheist today, his publications and letters clearly disavowed any such thing.

This is in part because he was modest (and accurate) about the scope of evolutionary biology, which concerns the diversification of life after it started. Darwinian evolution does not concern life’s origin or the existence of God, yet the perception that it does is widespread. This misunderstanding makes it harder to appreciate how compelling the evidence for his theory really is. Darwin made many predictions about what later scientists would find regarding patterns in the fossil record, development, and anatomy among species, and we know that patterns of genetic diversity match his predictions as well.

In my book Evolution and Belief: Confessions of a Religious Paleontologist, I review how science has proven him correct in the essential details and describe how biological complexity has arisen from natural processes. While I believe these processes were unrelated to a human-like, master intelligence, I do not thereby deny the existence of God. Comprehension of a natural mechanism is independent of a potential agency behind it; we can no more assert atheism due to our understanding of evolution than claim the non-existence of Thomas Edison due to our understanding of electricity. In my book, I reiterate Darwin’s own argument that his theory presents a mechanism by which life has diversified, representing a cause which does not specify any potential agency behind it. Evolutionary biology – along with the natural sciences in general – does contradict superstition, but it does not rule out belief in God.

One of the challenges we face as a society is to honestly identify the conflicts between religious belief and scientific literacy, and help draw the line between religion and superstition. In the case of Christian faith, a good starting point is to recognise the obvious benevolence of scripture; for example, do not slander others (Matthew 15), be humble (Romans 3) and truthful (Matthew 5). These passages are no less sublime because of others that seem to condone snake handling (Mark 16), misogyny and primogeniture (Deuteronomy 21). At least some scriptures seem genuinely timeless and inspired; other passages seem more intertwined with the local time and culture in which they were written. Every generation of Christians (and those of other faiths) will grapple with such passages, some reasonably suggesting that maybe the ‘objectionable’ ones don’t mean what we think they mean. Like any other human endeavour, religious interpretation should be accorded the capacity for self-reflection and correction as we learn more about ourselves and our cosmos. Like any other natural science, evolutionary biology is a part of this process.

Dr Robert Asher is a palaeontologist and lecturer at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Department of Zoology and a curator at the ̽��ֱ�� Museum of Zoology. His book 'Evolution and Belief: Confessions of a Religious Paleontologist' was recently published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press.

̽��ֱ��relationship between science and religion has had its rocky moments. But Dr Robert Asher, author of the newly published book 'Evolution and Belief: Confessions of a Religious Paleontologist', argues that the two sides can find common ground.

Like any other human endeavour, religious interpretation should be accorded the capacity for self-reflection and correction as we learn more about ourselves and our cosmos. Like any other natural science, evolutionary biology is a part of this process.

Dr Robert Asher

Robert Asher

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Yes

A Class Apart

bjb42 — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:07:53 +0000

Social mobility, recent research tells us, has ground to a halt. Not just that, it has actually slipped backwards since the 1950s with the chasm between classes even wider than ever. There are many ways of measuring social mobility, of course, and one of them is education. Achievement within the education system is seen as one of the critical benchmarks for social mobility.

̽��ֱ��latest figures paint a dispiriting picture. A report by educational charity the Sutton Trust earlier this year argued that the top comprehensives were even more exclusive than the country’s remaining grammar schools with only 9.2% of children at the top 164 comprehensives coming from "income-deprived" homes, even though those schools drew their pupils from areas where about 20% were poor.

Only last month government watchdog the Office for Fair Access called for sweeping reforms because working class pupils now have less chance of getting into the most sought-after universities than 15 years ago. At seven of the Russell Group universities – the UK's 20 leading research institutions – less than 5% of students came from low-participation neighbourhoods.

̽��ֱ��relationship between society and education is an area that has fascinated Diane Reay, Professor of Education at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Faculty of Education, since she was an undergraduate at Newcastle. Why? “Because I was brought up in a working class mining community and inequality of all kinds has been a lifelong concern,” she says.

Reay forged her career in teaching, working in London primary schools for 20 years before taking a PhD and moving into academia (South Bank Polytechnic, King’s College London, London Met, Cambridge – “quite a mix”). She’s made her name as a sociologist, who takes a feminist ethnographic approach – in other words, she embeds herself within her research field to observe, analyse and record the communities she’s studying.

Her priority, she says, is to engage in research with a strong social justice agenda to address inequality in all its guises. ̽��ֱ��projects she has undertaken over the past 10 years are set against backdrops that range from inner city schools to the most selective universities - with the accent on “social class, gender and ethnicity and how they play out in people’s actual lives”. In academic circles her best-known work is a study of home/school relationships and she is acknowledged for her innovative work in analysing social class.

Prompted by a concern about educational inequality, Reay’s latest work revisits economic historian RH Tawney´s conclusion in 1931 that social class is the hereditary curse of the English educational system, constraining a sense of social solidarity and limiting freedom. "Freedom for the pike is death to the minnows" as he famously put in his book Equality.

R H Tawney was a pioneer of adult and workers’ education – though himself educated at Rugby and Oxford. As an activist, he devoted his intellect and energy to putting into practice his passionate belief in social justice. He joined the Workers Education Association (WEA) and travelled up and down the country teaching at trade unions and working men’s institutes, lecturing at Stoke-on-Trent one day and in Rochdale the next. This he described as having two-way benefits. “ ̽��ֱ��friendly smitings of weavers, potters, miners and engineers, have taught me much about the problem of political and economic sciences which cannot easily be learned from books”.

Tawney was convinced that true democracy could be achieved only through the “elimination of all forms of special privilege which favour some groups and depress other.” In his book Equality (1931) he argued that difference between groups (which should be valued) was no reason for not seeking the largest possible measure of equality of opportunity, environment and circumstance.

Reay believes that many of the barriers to equality that Tawney identified almost a hundred years ago continue today – both within and beyond the educational system. Her analysis of the relationship between education and social class in contemporary Britain throws up many interesting questions – and turns some accepted thinking on its head.

A paper in collaboration with other researchers explored the positive decisions of middle class parents to send their children to urban comprehensives as a result of their beliefs in the principle behind non-selective state schools. In the course of in-depth interviews it emerged that many of these parents saw the mixed environment of their local schools as a resource that would benefit their children for “coping in the real world” or “toughen them up”– and that genuine mixing of social groups was only rarely taking place.

In a later project Reay looked at the question of “fitting in or standing out” for working class students at four contrasting universities. Although her sample was not statistically significant, her findings that high-achieving working class students often under-perform and feel disappointed, and that their pathway to top universities is often more a question of “luck and happenstance” than planned design, are particularly pertinent set against recent data. This shows that the percentage of students from the two lowest socio-economic groups gaining places at Cambridge was just 3.7 and at Oxford a mere 2.7 (Higher Education Statistics Agency report).

Social mobility is a problematic phrase bringing assumptions and implications. ̽��ֱ��underlying concept is of movement upwards and downwards. At the bottom of the heap sits the working class with council estates, manual jobs and low aspirations among its youngsters; at the top stand the upper/middle classes with glittering careers, large houses and young people with unassailable self-confidence.

Life just isn’t as simple as that – and real people don’t fit into neat categories. Modern sociology recognises more dimensions and cultural subtleties in the shifting social roles that people move into and out of. As Reay points out, the area of education in most urgent need of reforming is vocational training where Britain lags way behind its European partners.

“ ̽��ֱ��reality is that any current growth in the jobs market is in the service and care sector – and that’s an area that’s been badly neglected,” she says.

Just back from a Nordic Federation Sociology of Education conference in Iceland, Reay speaks warmly about Finland where children don’t start formal school until they are seven years old and there’s “no setting, no streaming and no testing”. It’s a country where teaching is the second most prestigious profession - and its children come top of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) league for literacy and second for numeracy. “Private schools educate only 2% of children in Finland, and those that do exist were set up to provide an alternative kind of education,” says Reay.

Reay is tremendously excited about her next project which is writing a paper for ̽��ֱ��Journal of Educational Policy describing her vision for a socially just education system – “a fantastic opportunity”. On a broader and more pragmatic front, she fears that the new coalition’s proposal to extend choice will further empower already powerful groups in society “although the pupil premium for poorer students may genuinely help to redistribute resources”.

Reay makes no bones about the fact she’d like to see private schools abolished - as did expensively-educated Tawney. “As long as children continue to be educated apart from their peers from different class and ethnic backgrounds, and 'a good education' remains the prerogative of the upper and middle classes, social class will continue to be the curse of the English, and beyond that the British, education system,” she says.

Professor Diane Reay will be speaking at the Hay Festival on June 3^rd, at 5.15pm.

Despite our best efforts, social mobility in the UK does not seem to be improving. Diane Reay, Professor of Education at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, will be speaking at Hay about the hereditary curse of the English education system and her developing vision for a “socially just” replacement.

As long as children continue to be educated apart from their peers from different class and ethnic backgrounds, and 'a good education' remains the prerogative of the upper and middle classes, social class will continue to be the curse of the English, and beyond that the British, education system

Dr Diane Reay

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Jumping to delusions: shortcuts in the brain

bjb42 — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Speaking at tonight's Café Scientifique, Professor Paul Fletcher of the Department of Psychiatry at ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will explain how scientists study behaviour, image brain oxygen levels, and manipulate humans with pharmacological agents in order to uncover how such delusional beliefs might arise.

According to Professor Fletcher: "Given scientific observations on the normal processes of the brain and belief formation, perhaps the delusional beliefs of mental illness can be more easily understood and can be recognised as not so far from rationality as they might first appear."

̽��ֱ��event, part of the Café Scientifique series, is a friendly informal gathering for everyone interested in chatting about the science that is changing our lives. Each month a different scientist discusses their work and takes question from the floor.

Tonight's free event is at 7.30 - 8.30 pm at the Larkum Studio, ADC Theatre, Park Street, Cambridge. Refreshments are available. Please arrive early to guarantee a seat.

̽��ֱ��series is sponsored by the Medical Research Council and organised as part of the national Café Scientifique forum in association with ̽��ֱ��Triple Helix Cambridge, a student society that explores interdisciplinary issues surrounding science.

Why do some people with mental illnesses entertain bizarre and seemingly irrational beliefs that make their lives a misery?

Perhaps the delusional beliefs of mental illness can be more easily understood and can be recognised as not so far from rationality as they might first appear.

Professor Paul Fletcher

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Mental Illness

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From beyond the grave

bjb42 — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It has become something of a newspaper commonplace that men and women of the modern West share an unusual aversion to death. Where once it was subject to intimate ritual among neighbours, and kin gathered around the domestic deathbed, it is now hidden, hospitalised and a ‘modern taboo’. Even less has been said about the dead themselves and their changing place in the imagination. Yet, as medieval historian Dr Carl Watkins is finding, an exploration of cultural change in attitudes to death over a long span provides a fascinating means of understanding how ordinary people relate to the dead and conceive of their fate.

Dr Watkins’ research requires consideration of obvious otherworldly places – heaven, hell, the cleansing fires of purgatory, the idea of judgement at the end of time – but also the less travelled byways. How have people related to their ancestors? How have they imagined the ancient dead whose traces (from saints’ bones to megalithic monuments) lie in their midst? Through tracing attitudes from the middle ages to the dawn of modernity, recorded in parish records and church archives, the research is showing that debates about the dead and patterns of thinking about their place have proved durable down the centuries.

Defining purgatory

One recurring theme is the fate of those deemed too sin-stained for immediate transit to heaven but not wicked enough for hell. ̽��ֱ��perennial problem posed by this spiritual ‘middling sort’ was solved by the medieval church when it gave purgatory sharp definition as the place where traces of sin might be cleansed in fire before the soul entered paradise.

Although, in the mid-16th century, Protestant reformers abolished purgatory as unscriptural, niggling questions remained about the fate of the majority. Could they really be consigned to hell’s fires? Still queasy about this, some Victorian churchmen reinvented the concept: worried by a loving God who still sent some into eternal fires, they ‘emptied’ hell entirely by arguing that universal salvation was possible. This even led the former Prime Minister William Gladstone to fear an epidemic of social disorder if the deterrent of hell was, in effect, abolished.

But did the saved not become complacent about their blissful condition? From indications in the New Testament that the saved and damned might see each other’s fate, an idea was spun out in lurid medieval visions in which the elect were briefly shown hell to redouble their own joys. Even as late as the 19th century, preachers were still drawing on the same idea, although modified for refined Victorian sensibilities: smoke from hell’s fires would waft discreetly through heaven to remind its inhabitants of their blessed estate.

Back from the dead

Popular beliefs about ghosts are perhaps the most tenacious aspects of ‘death culture’. Of course, deciphering these beliefs entails taking folklore seriously as a historical source. Folk stories were lovingly accumulated by collectors from the second half of the 17th century onwards, and the reactions of these learned observers can be as telling as the tales they set down. Although usually sceptical and detached, they sometimes slip in autobiographical comment on their own hopes and fears about death and the dead, and sometimes betray how stories in which they are immersed then infiltrated and shaped their own beliefs.

What this research is beginning to suggest is that many beliefs about the dead and debates about their fate were perennial ones, transcending some of the great cultural and religious changes wrought in the medieval and early modern worlds.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Carl Watkins (csw14@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of History.

Tracing popular beliefs from medieval to early modern times is highlighting the durability of debates about the dead.

Folk stories were lovingly accumulated by collectors from the second half of the 17th century onwards, and the reactions of these learned observers can be as telling as the tales they set down.

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