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[Enda:] Welcome to Futures Conversations, the Edinburgh Futures Institute podcast that showcases all the wonderful research taking place at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Research at the Futures Institute is challenge-led and interdisciplinary addressing many of the greatest challenges we face in the world today. I'm your host, Enda Delaney, the Director of Research at the Futures Institute. [Electronic beat] [Enda:] In this episode, I'm joined by Professor Liz McFall.
Liz is professor of Sociology of Markets and Director of the EFI Data Civics Observatory. Liz, just to get our discussion going, could you tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, who inspired you, what values were important to your family and wider social group?- [Liz:] So I'm from Broxburn, which is a small former shale mining town about nine miles west of Edinburgh.
On my father’s side, my history traces back to Irish immigrants who came to work the shale mines, the shale oil industry. Broxburn was a boom town for about just under 100 years, it was the biggest crude oil manufacturer in the world for that period of time. But the significant part of that for me, erm... growing up there was that university wasn't really a thought for people of my background, people at my school.
So Edinburgh University was obviously something we knew about, and you knew of people who went there, but it wasn't really a thinkable thought. Even though I would say from about the age of 13 or 14 I knew I had some level of academic ambition. So I went from school at the age of 16, I wasn't quite at my 17th birthday, to Queen Margaret College, which was then in the second year of launching a degree called Communication Studies.
I remember one of the nuns, Sister Immaculata, saying to me, “central institution degrees are not worth the same as university degrees”, but they had the same name, Bachelor of Arts, so I didn't really understand that. I think my biggest understanding of university was from watching University Challenge, and I did not identify.- [Enda:] And what was this route to academia for you?
You're obviously- you're a professor of Sociology now at Edinburgh University, you know, how did you get from Queen Margaret to- to where you are today?- by a very convoluted route. [Liz:] By a very convoluted route. So I was less than 17 years old when I started my first degree in 1982. By 1985, I had dropped out. And it took me till 1987 to realise that was a bad idea. So I had to finish the degree, which I did.
But that left me with an ordinary BA degree at a time when I was increasingly thinking I want to get back to academic work. So in about 1990, I signed up for a master's degree. The only master's degree I could get funding for was one that included Information Technology, which the Scottish Office was then funding master's degrees for. This is immediately pre-internet, so the information superhighway was beginning to be talked about. But no one really knew what that was.
And as someone who wasn't really a technical person, I didn't really understand what it was either. And it was interesting enough, even though at least 50% of it was a struggle for- for me to understand things like the engineering of networks that was starting to happen and the little bits of coding on expert system shells that I had to do, which was probably the worst three weeks of my life.
But there was a part of it which was to do with information technology or innovation policy, which I did get very interested in. That's why I did my dissertation in, and the route that I took was about the social and cultural determinants. At that time, everyone was talking about Japan, or to some extent, France, as being exemplars of how you support an innovation policy that can enable economic recovery to pick up really quickly.
And I had the sense that this simply wouldn't work here because you could see the cultural and social determinants of why that works in other places, but wouldn't necessarily work here. And I think that was probably one of the things that reminded me that the sociocultural dimensions of economic policy was kind of where my interest really lay. I was always interested in the kind of cultural and promotional side of communication.
So I'd been very interested in advertising, but I was kind of interested not just in how it looked, but how it worked. So I started teaching in further education in what was then called Jewel and Esk Valley College, and I was teaching marketing and basically anything they asked me to teach [laughs] and this was a route for me to try and figure out if I wanted to teach. And around that time, I was hired by the Open University as a part time tutor, teaching an Introduction to Social Sciences.
And this was really kind of enlightening for me because I remember in the early sort of, staff development workshops being asked: “well, what was my discipline?” And I didn't have an answer, I didn't know.
[laughs] So it took about three years of teaching on that course to realise that if I had a home, it was more sociology than anything else, but I still considered myself a very kind of unconventional, sociology-adjacent type person in a kind of academic disciplinary way, if not an intellectual way.- [Enda:] I started my academic career in the Open University as well, and I mean, I'm interested to know if you you feel that the values of,
of the Open University, that you've sort of carried them with you through- throughout your career, their emphasis on social inclusion, diversity of learning, different cohorts of people that they attract?- [Liz:] Oh, absolutely. The Open University, certainly as it was when I joined in the early ‘90s, has absolutely shaped my values and what- what I hold most sacred, if you like in higher education, and that is to do with accessibility to all.
It's also to do with making content that is going to work on a variety of different levels, for a variety of different abilities and a variety of different backgrounds. The way that the Open University did that, certainly in the social sciences, was to present dimensions of everyday life to students. So you're meeting students where they already are.
You're kind of engaging them with things they already know, and just pushing a bit further to try and think about aspects of everyday life, making the familiar strange. And at that time, you had people like Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey on Open University broadcasts, which were still happening on BBC2 late at night, but also on more mainstream programs like The Late Show, expressing and communicating these ideas.
And this kind of blew me away because I hadn't thought about disciplines in that way.- [Enda:] This emphasis on the everyday, I think, fits very much into what you do at EFI, running the Data Civics Observatory, which I know has being inspired by the the great town planner and polymath, Patrick Geddes.
Could you tell us a little bit about what the Observatory does, what- what its purpose is and how you see that, er, informing policy, society more generally?- [Liz:] When I first heard about the Edinburgh Futures Institute, I was blown away by how much this kind of geographical site had changed.
And the ideas for the Edinburgh Futures Institute at that moment were just mind blowing to me in terms of what looked like a commitment to doing- to doing education a bit differently, to making, as the saying goes, a more porous-walled university. So it was much less cut off from the city, and that went on to inform the ideas behind the Data Civics Observatory.
When I first encountered the work of Patrick Geddes, it was when I came back to Edinburgh and did that thing that people often do when they've left the city and returned 20 years later, I was looking at it with new eyes and trying to map together what the city I had known and loved, actually all my life, but particularly in the ‘80s and ’90s when I lived here, to the changes that had taken place, and to try and look for, probably for the first time, at how the city functioned technically
and materially. I think that sort of slowly led me to the work of Patrick Geddes, who appealed to me enormously as I started to find out more about him for all sorts of reasons. But most keenly was the idea that he was a very, very keen observer and a very eclectic observer of everyday life.
So he had been developing a whole bunch of different visual techniques for watching the city, observing the city, trying to understand how people lived within it, but trying to understand it not just from a scholarly perspective, trying to understand it because he wanted to intervene, taking a close watch on the city.
But secondly, the idea of conservative surgery, because this Royal Mile, this, part of the Old Town that looks like it's always been that way, actually owes much of its appearance to the kind of interventions that Geddes and his, erm, followers and community actually made. So the appearance of decked access, the little balconies on which you'll see plant pots, and so forth, and the green areas around Ramsay Gardens, these are a direct result of his quite early commitment to conservative surgery.
Not treating, erm, problematic areas of cities as something that needed to be completely bulldozed, modernised. Conservative surgery was “let's save the important bits and improve them and make them more liveable. Let's deal with these kind of every- things that everybody wants a bit of natural light, green space, housing that's not dark, crowded, damp.”
That was really appealing to me, this kind of combined observatory and laboratory on the city as a sort of thing that EFI might be able to sort of reinvent- and this sort of settlements project reinvention, this idea that, well, we are responsible for the city more than just as an employer, more than just as a landlord, and more than just as an education institute. We have expertise that should be intervening in the city and- and has the capacity with things like the City Region Deal to do it.
The Data Civics Observatory basically just tries to reinvent Geddes’ core ideas for a- a contemporary context. Also provide you an insight to how those cities are functioning how people feel about those cities, whether they're visitors, short-term residents, or long-term residents. So we've experimented with a number of small projects to try and do a Geddesian type thing of, erm, observing and experimenting with, well, how does it work to watch the city and sort of almost play it back to it?
So amplify the knowledge that's already out there amongst local communities.- [Enda:] Maybe just be worth explaining for the listeners the sort of socioeconomic context of- of Granton Waterfront and what you've been involved in doing there.- [Liz:] Sure, erm, so Granton is in an area that borders the Forth, along the Firth of Forth after the Industrial Revolution, it becomes very significant in terms of Edinburgh's transition, to using gas energy.
So the train lines, which are now cycle paths, stretch along the North shore and they end up in Granton, and they would have fed the gasworks, which gradually in the 20th century, became also places where a lot of early municipal housing estates grew up. So you get this dense social housing appearing, sometimes under quite severe economic constraints.
So the building- housing itself, even though some of it was award- award-winning in its time, was probably not manufacturers of the best quality materials. So flats became damp, erm, they became dirty, they became hard to maintain, they became very cold in the winter. And at the same time this was happening, the economic fortunes were starting to fail.
So you had a period where this bulk of housing, the density of housing, had grown up very quickly and in advance of the infrastructure, in advance of the green spaces and the shops and schools that you need to sort of, form the social and cultural life of a city. To cut a long story short, in the postwar period, areas like Granton, despite whatever hopes there were for them, became centres of a concentration of multiple deprivation.
And you get the same patterns, if you look at the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, all surrounding the perimeters of Edinburgh, you get the dark colours, the blacks that indicate a high index of multiple deprivation. And it's striking how much that the social topography of Edinburgh actually resembles its natural topography, where you have this volcanic peak in the centre sloping away down to the south and the north.
The interest in Granton as a Data Civic Observatory project came from well, let's try and understand how this has happened.
And also particularly from, to go back to the City Region Deal, the fact that the Granton Waterfront development project had started there, and this is a very long-term, public sector-led project designed to take a more sustained and comprehensive approach to regeneration in the area.- [Enda:] So I wanted to move on to ask you a little bit about the visual dimension to- to your work. There's a very strong visual, erm, dimension.
Both in the Granton Civicscope and also the work of the AreWeData Collective. Why is the visual dimension so important for- for what you do?- [Liz:] I think there's all sorts of aspects to it. The most obvious one is having the background at the Open University The Open University taught in a very visual way, because if you're not seeing students face to face, you need all sorts of tools to make, erm, ideas come alive for them.
It takes 20 to 40 minutes to watch the kinds of films that the collective I’m involved with make, and I hope to kind of make people feel something as a result of watching these films, not just acquire facts, but acquire a sort of feeling to be literally moved by, well, this is the history of the place that I live in. This is the history of why this shop layout is this shop layout. Very, very ordinary and very, very mundane. But how it happens is really fascinating.
And you can tell those stories in film in a way that you can’t, erm, in an academic paper, and you certainly can't tell them to the sort of variety of audiences that, erm, I hope are out there.- [Enda:] I'm fascinated by your research on the sociology of markets, particularly your work on the insurance industry, erm, can you tell us a little bit about the insights that’s offered by your research on an industry that perhaps mightn't be seen as the most obvious place for a sociologist to work on?-
[Liz:] Being a sociologist of markets, and particularly a sociologist of insurance, puts you in quite a- quite a narrow group. And this has struck me as somewhat bizarre. Insurance, in many ways, is the very first mechanism for the distribution of risk. It’s how we collectivise and share across a society. So it's at the very political and social centre of how societies are organised economically. It's fate matters in terms of how risk is distributed and who pays for it in society.
And in the last 100 years, there has been a fairly steady individualisation of that risk, both in terms of how individuals insure themselves against calamities or plan for their future, in terms of their pensions. But also in terms of how the social and political infrastructures on which we all rely are funded. A similar pattern can be observed in almost every field of insurance, including things like, climate insurance.
Notoriously, the capacity of individuals to insure homes in flood-prone areas has diminished. And behind the scenes of that, there's this kind of jostling between, erm private and public measures for collectivising or individualising risk, which are not straightforward. That sometimes we are towards a more social collective solution and other times to a very individual solution. And tracking that through tells you a great deal about the sort of social and political settlement.
I was quite simply fascinated by how you get people to buy products that they don't want, like, need, understand. And life insurance is a fantastic example of that, particularly life insurance that was bought by poor customers, working class customers. So the early appetite for insurance were, the very poorest in society would devote a substantial proportion of that income, at a time when they could barely feed the family, to paying for this arcane financial product.
That seemed to me a fascinating social and sociological problem. To understand how that worked. I should probably also mention that my father sold this form of insurance [laughs] So from the- all through the late 1960s to the 1970s, I was the social accompaniment to an agent that helped- I'm making this sound terrible.
I didn't help my my father on his rounds, but it was common for this to be seen as a family and community arrangement.- [Enda:] How does this fit into the work that you've done, you have been a pioneer in the field of cultural economy and, erm, that's a really important field.
What do you think that field offers us at the moment, and indeed, given our emphasis in the Futures Institute, erm, down the line in- in the future?- [Liz:] Cultural economy at its core is a project, and certainly, as I understand it, is all about the orchestration of technique and sentiment, by which I mean that you have to understand the way that the material, technological, economic and financial forms of organisation intersect
with how meaning is created for the customers in that marketplace. How does this product mean something? If you take the example of insurance, you're dealing with a product that people don't understand. So you need some kind of interaction that makes it makes sense and makes it be meaningful. So that is kind of trying to understand always the intersections between culture and economy.
That culture is not this realm outside, that’s not this kind of purified state of highest civilisation that humankind can reach. Culture is meaningful. Activity is meaningful practice.
So cultural economy is a project, whether it's applied to high frequency trading, climate, risk, data surveillance always has that interest at looking at the sort of material, political, technological arrangements and infrastructures of a given empirical case- [Enda:] One of the things I've been really struck, Liz, talking to you is you've got a very strong historical perspective.
As a historian I obviously value that. And... it's great to have, that sort of said, why do you- why do you think it's so important for us to understand the past, to inform the present and the future?- [Liz:] For me, it's absolutely crucial to have a perspective on the past. I remember one of my colleagues, Yuval Millo, was saying to me, well, basically all sociology is historical.
Even if you're studying the newest form of algorithmic trading, it's historical because you can only look backwards as an empirical object. You can only look backwards. I think if you're a sociologist studying a present day phenomena, you're always kind of looking backwards to look forward.
Understanding where we're pointing to in the future involves understanding how the past got to be the way that it was, and what the intersection of, whether it's regulatory apparatus or, economic cycles or the change in fashion. There is a lesson for that. I'm probably going to have to go back to the industrial insurance example again, partly because one of the things that really killed that industry is it became unfashionable.
It became unfashionable to have a product that was directed- a financial product that was directed only at working class people. It fell out of the step- out of step with everyday life. People didn't want an insurance agent calling at their doors anymore. So everyday life, the patterns of everyday life changed. And understanding that is germane to understanding what happens to the financial industries in the second half of the 20th century.
Unpicking how the- how the world was structured, the financial world was structured then to where we are now- [Enda:] One thing that I think is... a part of contemporary societies is concerns about the amount of data that private companies, be they insurance companies, our banks, hold about us all. Do you think that's a legitimate concern on the part of citizens across the world?- [Liz:] I think it probably is a legitimate concern, but I think for me, I come at it slightly differently.
I want to understand the specificities of how data is operating in particular, rather than just kind of go to the big headline banner of surveillance capitalism and the assumption that we are heading towards a darker and darker place I want to understand how datafied applications and platforms are useful or not useful to people, but I also want to understand the specificities of how they function commercially.
So in my own field of, erm, studying insurance and life and health insurance and how it's been affected by big data and the drive towards more individualisation of- or personalisation of insurance products, I think it was easy to assume, say, with the example of the introduction of self-tracking devices having those attached to insurance policies, it's easy to assume that- that this is a step towards personalising risk so that every individual is priced for
how much activity they do, how many bags of crisps they eat so that their individual health risk is measured and priced accordingly and they could be knocked out of the insurance market. In my own empirical research, that's simply not what we found. To classify and price individual risk at that level using these devices just is not how insurance risk functions.
So in that particular example, the incorporation of self-tracking products in life and health insurance has got much more to do with marketing and attaching people to products. If you give a free Apple Watch with, interactive behavioural life or health insurance product, people like Apple Watches, they don't like insurance.
So attaching the two together, you get some brand equity transfer, you get some, you know, sticky attachment where people want their Apple Watch, even if they don't love their insurance policy. So there's something else going on there.
That you don’t discover- this is basically a defence of, erm, if you've got this pressing public issue to approach it empirically as the best work in critical data studies now does, it's like, well, what is the- how is data being used in this particular instance rather than the large headline stories- [Enda:] My sense is that one element that you feel is that this data can empower communities, particularly local communities.
Is that a- through use of data in order to present cases or socioeconomic profiles that communities can, in fact be empowered, rather than it just being something that's imposed on communities, if that makes sense?- [Liz:] I mean, I think there are some intriguing examples of that in practice. And some of the urbanists who've looked to Patrick Geddes for- for example, to- to try and make sense of how urban life could be less sort of a smart city kind of top down version of how you manage cities.
But a grassroot- grassroots, bottom up version have looked at the way in which communities can develop their own platforms or use existing platforms to share data and to organise their activism. One of the things that I didn't remember to mention earlier on about an area like Granton; Granton may have scored very highly in the Multiple Index of Social Deprivation, for decades, but it's also been a centre of, erm, grassroots, sustained activism over many decades.
And I think that in the contemporary context, there are examples starting to appear of communities using platforms to do that. You could look at very mundane things, like the prevalence of neighbourhood WhatsApp groups or Nextdoor, which is an app that communities use to to share information.
But also the appearance on platforms like Substack, which have- are beginning to rediscover the power of community newspapers, because that's a much, much more cost effective way than actually printing a newspaper now. So you get a newsletter which circulates and shares that kind of density of local issues and organises a sense of belonging, potentially, and community ownership.
And I think that those kinds of things, there are also placemaking type instances of the use of Instagram and Twitter to kind of just share the status of an area of the type of where I live, like Newhaven, its appearance and social media over the years does change the texture and flavour of that place in some positive ways and in some negative ways.
So I think there is the potential there to use new forms of data in a grassroots organising way to type of redress and organise something alternative to the idea of well the council is going to make a big change, and we're going to do community consultation as a more kind- there may be people who will never go to a community consultation exercise, but they may well post on Instagram or on Twitter or somewhere else about- or Nextdoor- about those issues.
So if instead of demanding the resource from communities and individuals to tell us what's happening in your community, councils and other voluntary bodies can then look at what are people actually saying about this place?- You've been involved in the Edinburgh Futures Institute for a number of years, being a very important person in designing what the- what the Futures Institute, erm, does, and what its outlook and what- what we would- would see as priorities in terms of research.
What sort of future do you envisage given your expertise?- [Liz:] So that's a great huge question [laughs] Enda, thank you. So one of the things that I've done since I've been involved in EFI is I’ve almost finished making the second film, which tracks what the role of institutes like Edinburgh Futures Institutes have in terms of managing the future.
And one of the jobs of those films is to try and showcase the expertise of people who are trying to wrestle with these, problems about the major catastrophes or challenges, wicked problems, whatever intractable issue the future seems to be representing. But it's also an attempt not just to showcase the individual expertise, but to better understand why futures institutes and City Region Deals and other forms of innovation complex are springing up now and what their chances are.
So there is this orthodoxy, if you like, that, interdisciplinarity, co-production and cross-sectoral working gives us the best chance of understanding these complex, intractable problems and, providing a response to them in the future. And to some extent, that's a difficult proposition because in terms of interdisciplinarity, it's easier to say than it is to do in a meaningful level. And the same is true of cross-sectoral work. It is probably the best strategy that we have.
It's a kind of modest and pragmatic attempt to mobilise and orchestrate and organise this- the mixture of talents that we need to discover and address the specificity of problems and what I would contrast it with, to go back to Patrick Geddes, is an opposition to the sort of tabula rasa the blank slate version of oh well we’ll wipe all this out, we’ll wipe out all these problems, and we'll start again.
And this kind of new techno-libertarian geopolitical imaginary that you will see, and visions coming out of a vision like California Forever, which is a bunch of tech billionaires trying to engineer a new future in California by buying up large tracts of land and those kind of large scale projects of, well, let's start again, we'll have a smart city and we'll make it sustainable, and we'll have vertical gardens like in NEOM in Dubai, which are not grounded, in the people who actually live there.
And in a way, I think that the attempt by futures institutes and City Region Deals and the others at their best because of their- their necessary incorporation of a variety of interest groups and their willingness to experiment with new tools are probably- probably about as helpful and positive a response as- certainly as I can think of- [Enda:] Well, thank you very much for an optimistic, message on which to- to leave us on and indeed for, erm, giving us these fascinating insights
into the work that you're undertaking at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. If you want to find out more about Liz's work, if you go to our website: www.efi.ed.ac.uk or follow us on social media channels. [Electronic beat]