Introduction

Engels provided one of the strongest and most famous indictments in the Marxist canon of capitalism and the suffering it causes with his accusation against the bourgeoise that they commit ‘social murder’:

Engels is drawing attention to how the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of people are made invisible by what McGarvey (2023) would today call the social distance between the murdered and the murderer. The assailant in a social murder is always absent from the scene of the crime. The relations of capital, between worker and bourgeoisie, leave no fingerprints, nor samples of DNA that can identify a perpetrator. The insightfulness of Engels lies in his assertion that the harm capitalism creates is assumed to be, as he says, natural, with the implication that no individual nor social class of people bear any responsibility. Poor health and wellbeing are waived away as plain bad luck, or, within the responsibilization discourses of neoliberalism, poor wellbeing is the result of an individual making bad choices about their health and wellbeing – perhaps deciding to smoke too much or indulging in too many high-fat foods.

This case study highlights issues around positionality, anonymity, autoethnography, ownership, and dissemination in research, and exemplifies the boundaries of qualitative research with art and with therapy. It draws from a study funded by the Society for Research into Higher Education that used a range of creative approaches to explore embodied academic identity. It will explore questions around positionality and visibility in the process, the challenges and opportunities of taking an autoethnographic approach, as well as considering the outcomes of research such as dissemination and the conflicting pressures on academics to produce outputs that ‘count’ and are not messy.

Context

This study came about from a personal need to explore the tensions that I felt about being an academic. I worked in educational development, with responsibility for supporting others to develop their own sense of academic identity. The idea of what an academic is or should be is not always made clear to an early career researcher.

The preceding description from an Omega member aptly captures the position of the gang vis-à-vis the Chinese secret societies as much as it contextualizes Omega’s genesis, expansion and consolidation from an informal prison group comprising Malay inmates to a transnational criminal enterprise. More importantly, the quote also attests to the racialized nature of gangs and organized crime in Singapore. Omega, a monoethnic gang formed in the late 1980s in prison and regarded as the most significant Malay secret society in post-independence Singapore, exists to safeguard and further the interests of Malay Muslim inmates against ‘infidels’, as an informant put it, comprising non-Malay as well as Malay Muslim gang members in Chinese gangs who are perceived to have compromised the welfare and rights of Malay Muslim prisoners. The Omega gang operates with strong racial and religious overtones, its primary objectives being the creation of a Muslim brotherhood in the criminal underworld by incorporating the Islamic doctrine of fisabilillah (for the sake of God) and staging a ‘counter-crusade particularly against the Malay Muslim members of Chinese secret societies’ (Ganapathy and Balachandran, 2019: 11). As an acronym, the word Omega has several meanings but two remain popular: ‘Our Men Establish the Greatest Association’ and ‘Orang Melayu Enter Gangster Area’, where the Malay words ‘Orang Melayu’ refer to ‘Malay people’. According to Kamaludeen (2016b: 953), ‘[t] he name makes reference to the spatial dynamics in gang membership, denoting an attempt by the Malays to gain a foothold in a domain already dominated by the Chinese’.

This chapter leverages on the context of a racialized postcolonial society and examines the emergence of Omega, exploring its members’ negotiation of their racial, religious, gendered and gang identities as they navigate the contours of racialization manifesting in complex and contradictory ways in prison. While the relevance of race affiliation among minority groups in particular has been noted in other prison contexts, its trajectory is different in Singapore (Pyrooz and Decker, 2011; Butler et al, 2018; Ganapathy and Balachandran, 2019). Racialized gangs have historically been entrenched in Singapore since the colonial period, not just in prisons but also on the streets, as seen in the case of the Chinese secret societies whose roots and subsequent institutionalization were discussed in Chapter 2 (see also Turnbull, 1996).

In the preceding chapters I have outlined that alienation exerts a toll on wellbeing and health. Human lives are stunted and damaged and, stepping into a more normative register, they are not what they could be. The capacities and capabilities that social agents possess lack the freedom to be fully actualized, and when those capacities and capabilities are enacted, it is within a set of estranged relations for the purposes of capitalist accumulation.

So, what can we do? What can we do to move to a social formation where this does not occur, where social agents can realize and enact their potential?

One theme that runs throughout this book is that alienation emerges out of multiple social relationships particular to capitalism. It is not a given, a fixed natural state of affairs that we must simply endure without complaint as that is the natural order. Alienation like so many other social constructed inequalities is not an inevitable or natural part of existence. On a very high level of abstraction, it is an instance of social construction, albeit one with a very powerful weight of material force behind it. That means the relations and circumstances that produce alienation can be changed. New relations can be created that could either dramatically reduce alienation or dispense with it altogether.

Time for a new society?

In sociological parlance the causes of alienation are structural. A host of research and theorization has attested that how social structures have come into being leads to highly deleterious effects on health and wellbeing. The relationship between ethnicity and wellbeing provides a useful example. One common experience for racialized minority groups living in majority White countries is worse health and wellbeing in comparison with the majority population. Older research in this area lapsed into victim blaming, holding people of colour to account for shorter life expectancy and poorer health during life. Everything from the deficits of traditional food culture to genetics were mobilized to place the blame. However, a new wave of research in this area found that the reasons why racialized minority groups experience worse health are located in the racist structures of society. Racism affects the lives of racialized groups in multiple ways.

In order to be the best qualitative researcher possible, it is essential to reflect. The previous lesson demonstrated that this is most effective when it results from embodied self-awareness. This long lesson begins with exploring the discourses of embodiment, bodies, and moving bodies, before investigating somatics as a tool for developing awareness, and how it can be used both therapeutically and educationally as well as for research. I end with an example of using somatics to teach young children to become more aware. But to start, what do I even mean when I use the term ‘embodiment’?

Embodiment

The idea of embodiment is contested (Sheets-Johnstone 2015). ‘Embodiment’ can describe the way our bodies represent ourselves at an individual or cultural level. This would be the definition used by many sociologists, such as Chris Shilling (2005, 2008, 2012) or Nick Crossley (2006). My use of embodiment rests on ‘fundamentally different assumptions’ from those of many sociologists (Totton 2009: 189). For example, Crossley’s work on Reflexive Embodiment includes ‘practices of body modification, maintenance and … body-image’ (Crossley 2006: 1). His understanding of ‘bodywork’ is work that is done on the body to change its appearance or function. Although he includes feelings and emotions we have about our bodies in his discussions of the social and constructed meanings attached to diverse bodywork or practices such as tattooing, eating, and exercise; his view of embodiment does not necessarily mean a self-awareness and consciousness being brought to the feelings and sensations within the body. Or Laura Ellingson, who rather than seeing her body and mind to be connected, saw her body as ‘troublesome’ (Ellingson 2017: 5) demanding her ‘continual attention and accommodation, making it impossible to ignore the ways in which embodiment necessarily affects (and is affected by) [her] research processes’ (Ellingson 2017: 5). Crossley and other sociologists might say that everything we do is embodied because we are embodied beings – living, breathing, meat sacks moving about the world. They would not necessarily agree with my definition that embodiment equates to conscious self-awareness of the body. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, a dancer and philosopher, would say that my use of the word is wrong and what I mean by embodiment is instead ‘kinaesthetic awareness’.

Part III is comprised of four case studies in which I explicitly explore how my creative and embodied research bordered onto education, therapy, art, and science. Creative research may have more in common with a case study approach than interventions, which have been shown to be more suitable for in-depth, holistic research (Feagin et al 1991). Case study methodology is used to assess complicated phenomena within their contexts (Baxter and Jack 2008). Although my research is phenomenological, even phenomenology can be seen to be interventionist if an intervention is understood as implying an ‘intentional action to bring about an immediate and effective form of beneficial change’ (Edwards 2001: 3). Phenomenology may be seen ‘as psychotherapeutic in its potential to bring about a whole new lived world’, and of course, any research event ‘essentially constitutes a form of intervention’ (Edwards 2001: 3).

I have learned much through my research practice, and the case studies are intended to illustrate the ways in which different research projects have pushed towards the borders with art, education, science, and, most vitally, therapy. Those therapists who work in service to their clients (Rogers 1967) have a clear moral impetus, and the intent behind their interactions with their client is to help them. In contrast, researchers, artists, and educators may have many different and often conflicting intentions. The boundaries and guidelines of what they do and why are not always clear and transparent. For example, academics are driven to produce research outputs and research impact within a neoliberal climate that demands performance in a number of managerial metrics and a competitive job climate (Martin 2011; Fitzgerald et al 2012; Gray et al 2019). As such, there may be a tension between the desire to gather deep, rich, and emotionally honest data, and doing no harm to oneself or one’s participants. If we as researchers want to engage our participants with the levels of engagement and interaction that creative research methods allow us, then I believe it is important to learn from a therapeutic approach.

Therapeutic training focuses on building rapport, trust, and developing a relationship and relational field in which a client feels safe and supported to speak.

Summary

Succeeding a (supposed) period of stability, the political mood of our times is dour. Previously accepted expectations of stability, growth, improvement, good governance, and global integration have been undermined. Since at least 2008, we have lived in an age of crisis. Public and intellectual attention has been turned towards a set of declinist or eschatological political possibilities. Within the midst of this, discussions of social media have served as a key reference point for anxieties and pessimisms. The volatile, sporadic, unmediated, and emotional discourses of social media have ostensibly undermined public cultures of deliberation, tolerance, respect for evidence, and civic identity. Echo chambers, hate speech, and conspiracy abound. It is difficult to imagine a more inauspicious context within which to discuss the construction of socialist ideologies, at least within a formally democratic country. Indeed, even the descriptor ‘democratic’ seems increasingly aspirational rather than a working premise.

But, social media is not only a lurid and noisy fairground of dissonance and dissensus. There is, within its tweets, blogs, podcasts, discussion groups, and YouTube channels, a province that we dubbed PSM. PSM is defined through a twofold protocol. Firstly, an adherence to broadly deliberative rules of discussion: evidential backing, tolerance, a degree of measure. Secondly, the deployment of social media signifiers to move political discourse into a social realm where it might be noticed and even engaged with by a broader public: the use of imagery and logos, memes, hot takes, and more ‘sassy’ language.

It is a fact that PSM has emerged into a thriving virtual arena over the same period as politics more generally has been understood as a series of disasters. This, we argue, is a moderate corrective to the images of democratic breakdown, post-truth, political disorder, and a range of post-liberal positions that seem transfixed by reactionary populisms. Within the province of PSM, there exists a vibrant socialist intellectual activism.

Socialism has bequeathed to us a historiography of impatient optimism, based in the conviction that, although capitalism has pushed societies out of absolutist, feudalist, and stagnant states, it is constrained by its own contradictions and exploitations. Socialism emerged as the ideological tradition that wanted more out of political modernity. Of course, socialism has been much predicted and rarely, if ever, realised. Once one accepts this, its persistence seems remarkable.

I have already drawn on my doctoral research in this book, and am using this case study to illustrate how qualitative research can border onto education and therapy. This study took place over two years in a school setting. It comprised group somatics sessions timetabled to be part of the school day. The study was primarily movement based and used a range of arts-based creative methods designed to support children aged four to 11 to develop their embodied self-awareness, learn to reflect, and capture that process. This case study highlights the importance of intention to differentiate between educational and therapeutic content, and how therapeutic outcomes can be gained from research set within an educational setting.

Context

My doctoral research involved 26 children aged from four to 11 years old (Reception to Year 6) in a school setting over two years (Leigh 2012). The publications from this work have included the use of creative methods and journaling to facilitate children to develop a reflective practice (Leigh 2020a); children’s experiences, perceptions, and self-regulation of emotion (Leigh 2017); and the connection between reflection, reflective practice, and embodied reflective practice (Leigh and Bailey 2013). I had worked with children in schools from early in the 2000s, offering after-school clubs in yoga at my children’s primary school and others nearby. Teaching yoga and movement to children is different from working with adults – there are three rules to consider, which can be summarised in just three points:

• 1. children are not mini adults;

• 2. children are not mini adults;

• 3. children are not mini adults. (Bailey 2012: 21)

As well as traditional animal-based movements that appeal to children (Mainland 1998), I found that, depending on age, they also enjoyed faster vinayasa type sequences (Devereux 1998), and balances that related to developmental righting reactions (Brook n.d.; Hartley 1989). Introducing developmental movements such as hopping like a frog or rabbit (there is a difference – try it!), walking like a bear, or making shapes like a chameleon stuck to a wall were all firm favourites. I had also worked with autistic children, children with cerebral palsy, and physical and intellectual developmental delay.

Frances’s story

“They got lost,” said Frances. She was an experienced social worker with years of service behind her. The profession had changed quite a bit in that time. She could recall a time when her day-to-day work was with people, discussing their problems, why they had become a client, as they used to say, of social work services and how they could work together to overcome the challenges that they faced. When they did find a way forward, solutions to the problems that the client faced, that gave her a buzz, a feeling of really achieving something. That is why she had decided to become a social worker: to make a difference to people’s lives. She liked her job, she liked her colleagues and she liked the clients with whom she worked.

Over the last 20 years social work had changed considerably. The changes were always small, a drip-feed of new protocols, subtle changes in management, and an increasing emphasis on recording the progress of each client, though they were now called service-users. All of those little changes eventually added up. The job was now totally different. The team in her office began to work longer and longer hours. Lunchtime disappeared. There was just so much to do and the pressure to complete tasks and meet benchmarks was unyielding. Anyone who took any time off from their work to grab a five-minute coffee or, heaven forbid, leave the office to buy a sandwich was immediately treated with suspicion: why could they take time away from their desk? They mustn’t have enough to do. The easy and happy camaraderie between colleagues disappeared.

The ever-increasing workload was bad enough, but what really frustrated her most, made her depressed, angry and frustrated, was that she hardly ever saw a client. That was always the highlight of the day, meeting someone and sitting down and trying to work things through with them. Instead, it was report after report after report. Endless reports to fill in that had obviously not been designed by a social worker. The reports somehow imagined that clients’ lives improved in nice straight lines that could be measured on some arbitrary scale.

Our times of re/insurgent politics

How recent, how long ago

We live in a time when the deadening aesthetics of the end of history seem very remote. This was a period, not so long ago, in which politicians, public intellectuals, and academics set the mood of the times as one characterised by a dissipation in political energies. This was the political tone of the 1990s in much of the West.

Francis Fukuyama – often caricatured and perhaps less often read – saw politics as historically transformed by the ascendance of liberal democracy and capitalism. For Fukuyama, liberal democracy and capitalism are not the coordinates of a geographically and historically sited political settlement; rather, they are the historical resolution of universal and transhistorical dialectics. These dialectics are in part material – what Fukuyama calls The Mechanism – and cultural – what he calls thymos, or, the struggle for recognition. The broad blush of history that Fukuyama rushes through moves towards a clear telos: that Historic contestations between ideologies are almost entirely ended.

Once peoples and societies identified with the market, individual rights, and the vote as ways to channel their desires, politics does not disappear but rather no longer generates the tectonic battles of major rivalrous ideological systems. The ideological global contest of liberalism against communism ended with the latter’s collapse, ushering in a politics of individual choice and minimal liberal rights written into constitutions. This is how Fukuyama identifies a Hegelian-styled end of history: as the passing of major ideological contention and some form of unification that spelt the end of major political contention. It is not that the world becomes liberal democratic, it is that this is the only progressive future they might advance towards. It is not that violence and social instability absent themselves from the world, it is that the order of these disturbances does not offer up any Historical possibility. There is an impression of bathos in Fukuyama, who sees a kind of worldhistorical victory ushering in a form of political quiescence and perhaps banality, a banality that leads him to conclude his book with the image of a settler community looking around and wondering what’s next. Fukuyama’s claim on history has been commonly refuted and revised, not least by the author himself. But, others have also characterised the sweep of history as the sweeping away of ideological combat in that period and afterwards.

The choreography of Twitter

I joined Twitter in order to get a stream of tweets letting me know about new research activity and press on various East African countries. I followed individual researchers and research centres in Europe and East Africa and was daily reminded that there was a fantastic amount of activity which I needed to keep up with.

One of my countries of interest was Rwanda. As I checked my stream, I followed more people, especially Rwandans that I was interested in interviewing. And then, gradually, things began to change. Anyone who has researched Rwanda will be familiar with the fact that commentary on the country’s prospects is extremely contentious and that a lot of this contention is hosted within Twitter and other social media. Some of the people I followed were constantly attacking critical commentators, often in ways that were hyperbolic and rather nasty. It came to seem, at times, choreographed. A certain well-known professor (Rwanda specialists will know who this is if they have Twitter accounts) would post a critique of some aspect of the government’s human rights record and immediately elicit a thread of hostile responses in which he would be accused of being imperialist, a genocide apologist, or senile. I could read this professor’s posts and pretty much guess the content of the responses. Furthermore, the endless repetition of this call and response made me realise that it served no purpose at all. Neither side changed their views.

I remained on Twitter and, as my research interests changed, I started to follow a clutch of socialist commentators who were active on the platform providing commentary on contemporary affairs, largely in the UK. These accounts connected to a set of associated news sites, blogs, podcasts, YouTube accounts, and research papers. They allowed me to connect to lively and seemingly diverse socialist positions during a time (around the time Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party) when it was possible to hold on to some slender hope that some move away from the political and economic stagnation of neoliberalism was possible.