Author Archives: I Arden

200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Slavoj Žižek, philosopher

World-renowned public intellectual Professor Slavoj Žižek has published over 50 books (translated into 20 languages) on topics ranging from philosophy and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to theology, film, opera and politics, including Lacan in Hollywood and The Fragile Absolute.  

He was a candidate for, and nearly won, the Presidency of his native Slovenia in the first democratic elections after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1990. Although courted by many universities in the US, he resisted offers until the International Directorship of Birkbeck’s Centre for the Humanities came up. 

200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Robert Browning, classicist and Greek historian

A professor of Classics and Ancient History from 1965 to 1981, Browning was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group and a famous Hellenist who campaigned against the dictatorship of the Greek Colonels (1947-74) and later served as the chairman of the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles. Like Ste Croix, Browning applied a Marxist theory of history to the ancient world. But his approach was different to that of Ste Croix, as was revealed in a review he published in 1983 of Ste Croix’s classic The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek Work (1981). Browning observed that Ste Croix’s book avoided the “kind of sectarian infighting in which some Marxists indulge”, and, as such was “a very English and pragmatic book, which may well infuriate some Marxist readers”. In other words, Browning favoured a more unequivocal Marxist account of historical change, while still contending that “I say a Marxist approach and not the Marxist approach”. Browning was also loyal to the Soviet Union, not only publishing a couple of articles in Russian but also maintaining a “close relationship… with the leading members of the national committees in the eastern bloc, accepting the structure of the academic community in the USSR as he did in politics”.  

200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Naheed Memon, CEO of Oracle Power

Naheed Memon is an Independent Non-Executive Director at Coro Energy Plc and a Chief Executive Officer & Executive Director at Oracle Power Plc. 
 
She is on the Board of Directors at Coro Energy Plc, Oracle Power Plc, Thatta Cement Co. Ltd. and Kings Apparel Industries (Pvt) Ltd. Ms. Memon was previously employed as a Chairman by Sindh Board of Investment, a Chief Executive Officer by Advicia Consulting Ltd., and a Chief Executive Officer by Manzil Pakistan. 
 
She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Karachi and an MSc Economics degree from Birkbeck. 

200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Kevin Gordon, family law barrister

Formerly a probation and aftercare officer in Jamaica, becoming a lawyer wasn’t always part of Kevin Gordon’s career plan. Having experienced the concepts of family law firsthand, and then moved to Britain as a social worker, he saw Birkbeck’s evening degree programmes as a ‘light bulb moment.’ He achieved his LLB Law in 2011 and was called to the Bar just two years later. 

Kevin is also a motivated and highly valued mentor on Birkbeck’s Mentoring Pathways programme, which is vital for the development of talented non-traditional law students, helping them get ahead with their careers in the legal sector. “I see myself as a product of good mentoring,” he says, “and it is so important to have someone of whom you can ask questions and not be judged.” 

As well as finding his calling as a barrister, Kevin trained and performed in Jamaica as a contemporary ballet dancer, an experience he has paid forward in London as the lead choreographer and dancer during the annual Miscellany Production and Gray’s Inn. 

200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effects: Jane Ittogi, Lawyer and public figure in Singapore

Jane Yumiko Ittogi is the wife of former Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam. A lawyer by training, Ittogi left the legal practice to support the local arts and education scenes and engage in community work. To date, Ittogi has served on the boards of the Singapore Art Museum, the National Heritage Board, the National Gallery Singapore, and Lasalle College of the Arts.  

At present, Ittogi is the Chair of Tasek Jurong Limited. A local non-governmental organisation (NGO), Tasek Jurong specialises in providing financial and social support to the socially disadvantaged. These include ex-inmates, youth-at-risk, single parents, the needy and disabled and their families. 

Ittogi later left legal practice to contribute to Singapore’s arts scene. Notably, Ittogi has held several key leadership positions across several landmark arts institutions in Singapore. 

200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Kevin Teo, lecturer in organizational psychology

Dr Kevin Teoh is a Chartered Psychologist and the Programme Director of the MSc Organizational Psychology at Birkbeck. He is also the Executive Officer for the European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology.  

His primary research interests are around developing healthier workplaces, and the translation of research into practice, policy, and public dissemination. Kevin has collaborated extensively with the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work and the Society of Occupational Medicine and has a particular interest in the working conditions and wellbeing of healthcare workers.  

Kevin has also worked with organizations in the private and public sectors. These projects have primarily been around workplace wellbeing, management training, recruitment and retention, and safety. Kevin has published in journals such as Work & Stress and the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, and is a regular speaker at academic, professional, and public events.  

200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Lara Bloom, president and CEO of Ehlers-Danlos Society

A graduate of Birkbeck’s BA Global Politics and International Relations, Lara Bloom is President and CEO of The Ehlers-Danlos Society and responsible for raising global awareness of rare, chronic and invisible diseases, specialising in the Ehlers-Danlos syndromes, hypermobility spectrum disorders and related disorders.  

As someone with an EDS diagnosis, before joining the Ehlers-Danlos Society Lara ran EDS UK from 2010-2015 and currently works with a range of umbrella organisations lobbying governments internationally. Lara played a key role in the recent international effort to re-classify EDS and create management and care guidelines. She co-authored the subsequent classification publication in the American Journal of Medical Genetics and serves on the steering committee of the International Consortium for EDS and Related Disorders. 

Commemorating ten years in the field of patient advocacy, Lara was appointed a Professor of Practice in Patient Engagement and Global Collaboration at Penn State College of Medicine in 2020. 

200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Thomas Hodgskin, lawyer, Lord Chancellor and defender of London Mechanics’ Institute

Thomas Hodgskin was an English socialist writer and a defender of free trade and early trade unions.  

In 1823, Hodgskin joined forces with Joseph Clinton Robertson in founding the Mechanics Magazine. In the October 1823 edition of the Mechanics Magazine, Hodgskin and Francis Place wrote a manifesto for a Mechanics Institute 

Hodgskin was a pioneer of anti-capitalism and his criticism of employers appropriation of the lion’s share of the value produced by their employees went on to influence subsequent generations of socialists, including Karl Marx. 

He contended that the “landlord and the capitalist produce nothing. Capital is the produce of labour, and profit is nothing but a portion of that produce”.  

Although relatively unknown today, Hodgskin deserves to be recognized as one of the founders of British socialism. 

200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Nadia Wassef, co-founder of Diwan bookstores and author

A graduate of Birkbeck’s MA Creative Writing, Nadia had already co-founded Egypt’s leading chain of bookstores, Diwan, with her sister. Prior to founding Diwan, she worked for a non-governmental organisation but she realised that the pace of change in Egypt was going to be too slow: “My sister and I both had post-graduate degrees in literature, and we were amazed that the modern style bookstore hadn’t come to Egypt yet. So, we decided to create it.” 

She has recently finished writing her first novel, telling her personal story as an entrepreneur and is a social history of Cairo during the twenty-first century. She is also a longstanding campaigner for women’s rights, having been involved with the Female Genital Mutilation Task Force in the 1990s. 

 Nadia regularly appears in the Forbes list of the Most Powerful Women in the Middle East. 

The future is here – exploring the role of AI in the world of homecare

Dr Kerry Harman from Birkbeck’s School of Social Sciences and Ms Caroline Firmin and Ms Dominique Davies use this blog to reflect on a recent exhibition they attended entitled ‘AI: Who’s looking after me?

I’m a senior lecturer at Birkbeck with a particular interest in invisible labour and marginalised knowledges. My interest in this area has led me to collaborating with Ms. Caroline Firmin from Birkbeck, Ms. Dominique Davies from Birkbeck and researchers at the University of Manchester on a case study entitled ‘Reimagining Homecare’ which explores sensory ways of knowing care. Caroline and Dominique are both homecare worker-researchers, and the ‘Reimagining Homecare’ project is part of a larger three-year AHRC funded Care Aesthetics Research Exploration (CARE) project.  

In August, Dominique, Caroline and I attended an exhibition entitled AI: Who’s looking after me? We all found the exhibition extremely thought provoking, so much so that we all kept thinking about it for days after we’d visited. As Caroline rode home on the bus (it was a long trip) she pondered the question: ‘can AI play a part in homecare’? It wasn’t the first time she’d thought about AI and homecare as it has been a focus of discussion within the field of homecare. What follows is a combined critical and poetic response from the three of us: 

‘AI: who’s looking after me?’ – well one response to that question would be the 1.62 million people working in Adult Social Care in England (skillsforcare). Of this very significant number of workers, 82% are female, the average age is 45, 23% have black, Asian and minority ethnicity and 16% have a non-British nationality. Almost a quarter of the adult social care workforce are employed on zero-hours contracts. Did we hear from or see any of these workers in the exhibition? No, but their silence was deafening and reverberated in the photographs of interiors of outsourced AI worker’s homes in the Global South in ‘The future is here’. 

The future is here 

I’m an elderly person of a great age past my eighties and keeping the rest a secret. 

I’m bedridden I need help from carers to help me get washed dressed change my pad . 

Hoist me from bed to armchair. Give me my medication. Make my meals and drinks . 

Do my laundry and housework.  

My family do my shopping and see to bills . I do need quite a bit of support.  

Can AI give me that kind of support? Can AI greet me in the morning with a smile on its face ? Can it respond to my needs, does it know how I’m feeling?  

Will AI talk to me and tell me what is happening outside where I live? For example, what is the weather like outside today? Is there anything new going on? Did you see any neighbours?  

Does AI know when I need a doctor.  

Does it know my thoughts and feelings? How do you have a relationship with AI like I do with my carers and family? 

Can it sense moods? Can it sense changes?  

We rely on technology everyday, sometimes it’s frustrating. Mostly we adapt to technology, because we don’t have a choice.  

Can we do without technology?  We use our phones, laptops, bank cards on a daily basis but when these go wrong what happens?  

What if AI goes wrong? Who cares for me now?  

Does AI have a place or contribute to homecare? 

What is AI? what does it do?  

Many of us have heard of AI but I don’t think we fully understand what it means. How is AI made and who programmes them? What role do they play in our lives?  

Can they play a role in our lives better or worse than humans? 

Can AI be corrupted, can it be trustworthy? Would the person receiving care be comfortable with AI?   

Can AI help the blind, deaf, disabled, wheelchair users, mental health, dementia/ Alzheimer’s? How would the elderly understand communicating with AI? 

Is AI here to stay forever and replace human feelings, touches, senses?  

I think humans need human touches and human responses. I think it makes them feel more connected…. 

The future is here 

For me, ‘Who’s looking after me?’ spotlights the question of ‘what does it mean to be human’? Visiting the exhibition prompted me to read ‘The Inconvenience of Other People’ by Lauren Berlant. Berlant provides a detailed exploration of the impossibility of sovereignty and argues that politically we need to learn to work with the ambiguity that the fantasy of sovereignty creates. I contend that in many ways AI could be thought of as a human response to the human desire for sovereignty. In other words, because people are ‘inconvenient’ we seek to create a world where we can bypass them. Enter AI. However, as Caroline and Dominique both ask, can AI replace ‘care’? And even if it could, this raises a bigger question: if we humans are going to go to the trouble of teaching machines ‘to care’, why not invest in teaching humans to care more for each other and the world? Why do we want machines to do that? As Berlant maintains, people (and things) ARE inconvenient, but we need to move beyond the fantasy of sovereignty as we continue to bump into each other in this world. Creating machines that can ‘care’ will not address the fantasy of human sovereignty, it will only mean that we need to develop new ways of relating to things. While the possibilities generated by new types of relations and relating should not be foreclosed, the fantasy that this will lead to greater sovereignty needs to be abandoned. In other words, we need to learn better ways of getting along together.  

The future is here 

I feel like a robot – robotic, when I’m performing care.  

Perhaps the future is here?  

…so lots of questions as we continue in exploring care aesthetics and sensory ways of knowing care.  

More Information: