This morning we have 2 absolute veterans of academic archers – and if we believed in hierarchies – which we don’t both are definitely honorary Professors of the university if Felperhsam and staunch supporters of Cara and I since the early days.
Both Helen and Kathryn are serial offenders 😉 and absolute stalwarts – not only in terms of giving papers but of trailing across the country and world with offers of support and hugs. – The only year Helen did not present was in Sheffield and she remains our most decorated author. As well as a much loved friend.
We couldn’t go on without you ladies.
In a change to our advertised schedule Helen burrows is flying solo this morning with her wonderful paper on transformative fandumteedumteedum which heavily features the labour of love that is the archers cardigan.
However it would be remiss of me not to catalogue the wide range of topics upon which Helen has presented over the years. The first year it was a piece on using TA for teaching social work, An Everyday Story of Dysfunctional Families: Using The Archers in Social Work Education.
Social work students need to understand the difficulties that their future service users may experience. Learning is developed through lectures, seminars and workshops, and most of all through practice placements, but a real challenge for social work educators is how to show students the constant lived reality of families who have complex difficulties. An hour’s visit to a family only gives a snapshot of that point in time, and service users may be guarded in their behaviour when a professional visits. This chapter considers the educational value of the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ perspective of The Archers, in catching unguarded moments. Recently the Helen and Rob Titchener storyline has accurately portrayed domestic abuse and doubtful parenting. Other examples include the impact of rural poverty, caring for a relative through progressive Alzheimer’s disease, and issues of substance misuse and criminal behaviour. The chapter also considers the use of ‘fan pages’ in social media, as a method for in-depth discussion of students’ learning, and the discussion of social work values and ethics.
This piece fits into a general sense of unease about how the agencies of the state appear in the programme.
In the survey we are conducting on social suffering, we encounter many people who, like that head-teacher, are caught in the contradictions of the social world, which are experienced in the form of personal dramas. He is faced with contradictions which are the extreme case of those currently experienced by all those who are called ‘social workers’: family counsellors, youth leaders, rank-and-file magistrates, and also, increasingly, secondary and primary teachers. They constitute what I call the left hand of the state, the set of agents of the so-called spending ministries which are the trace, within the state, of the social struggles of the past. They are opposed to the right hand of the state, the technocrats of the Ministry of Finance, the public and private banks and the ministerial cabinets I think that the left hand of the state has the sense that the right hand no longer knows, or, worse, no longer really wants to know what the left hand does. In any case, it does not want to pay for it.
We can see this playing out in our current situation and this is in some sense the most profound articulation of the difference between neoliberalisation and the civil and public service ethos, value and ascribed to our “key workers”
But I digress. Helen has also served us more playful papers – the British Library security arrangements had to include how her morris troupe could access this auditorium for example, and who could forget their standard which she had so cleverly crafted?
It is in this vein that she appears this morning – exploring the crafts
We wrote about this in custard that fandom and creativity are closely aligned and I want to present helen’s contribution as part of The Fandom Gift Economy
Tasha Turk has discussed fandom as a “gift economy,” based not on money or on explicit exchanges of goods or services, but on giving, receiving, and reciprocating. She argues that the process of gift exchange “is part of what makes it possible to experience and analyze fandom as a community, or rather an overlapping series of communities, rather than simply a large and shifting number of people occupying the same affinity space” (Turk 2014). In fandom, Turk argues that the most valued gifts are those which take time and/or skill to create. The value of those gifts, then, “lies not simply in the content of the gift, nor in the social gesture of giving, but in the labor that went into their creation” (Turk 2014).
According to Turk, fannish gifts include not only the most visible forms of creative output – fic, art, vids, etc. – but the “wide range of creative labors that surround and in some cases underlie these art objects” (Turk 2014). These include commenting on others’ art or writing, volunteering one’s editing skills to help a fanwriter, writing recommendations or reviews, organizing online challenges or exchanges, editing zines, planning conventions, creating websites for fannish activity, etc. The work which goes into maintaining the fandom ‘economy’ is related to the formation of fandom as a community: Turk describes fandom as a system “not just of reciprocal giving but of circular giving” (Turk 2014). Since most of the “gifts” described above are posted online (or published in a zine), not just sent to a specific person, the entire community (or whichever subset is interested) can be considered the recipient of the gift.