Once upon a conference

‘I was young. It was a conference. “Policing Split Cities.” They had sessions on Budapest and Jerusalem and Berlin, and Besźel and Ul Qoma.’ So Inspector Tyador Borlú informs Constable Lizbyet Corwi in China Miéville's (2009: 90) The City & the City. The conference I have in mind was more recent, had a different title, and was the most prestigious literary studies conference I have attended. The chair of my panel, a professor for whom I have great respect, referred to each contribution as an ‘intervention’. My contribution concerned the representations of social control in Octavia Butler's (1993) Parable of the Sower, Nalo Hopkinson's (1998) Brown Girl in the Ring, and Miéville's novel. My idea was that literature in general and science fiction in particular can be a powerful catalyst for what critical criminologists refer to as the criminological imagination, an interpretation of the social world that reintegrates personal troubles with public issues or, to use social scientific terminology, reconciles agency and structure in explaining the causes of harm. An intervention is an act of interposing or interfering in an affair so as to affect its course or consequences. I’d have been delighted if my presentation had intervened in social reality, but the only state of affairs whose course or consequences it was likely to alter were the thoughts of the audience and even that was an optimistic assessment. My contribution did not, however, seem any worse (or any better) than those of my fellow panellists and all the professor's courtesy did was draw my attention to the fact that no one at the conference was actually doing anything that was going to make a difference to the life of anyone who wasn't in the audience.

I must be careful here to avoid appearing to endorse the neoliberalisation of higher education, which I discuss briefly in Chapter Seven and to which I am unequivocally and resolutely opposed. I am not interested in quantifying the results of my research beyond what the Research Excellence Framework in the UK compels me to do every seven years, but I do think that academics who study literature (whatever their discipline) should do more with their research than find interesting things to say about wonderful books that only a tiny percentage of the global population will ever read.