Next week, starting on Monday 30th October, we will be staging the first IASH Twitter Takeover, where we hand over control of the IASH Twitter feed (@IASH_Edinburgh) to a Fellow. For seven days, the Fellow will highlight their research topic, explore themes and ideas connected to their time at IASH, and report on events that they're attending. The first Twitter Takeover will be Community Fellow Jemma Neville. Jemma has been at IASH since July, as a sabbatical from her role as Director of Voluntary Arts Scotland, the national strategic development agency for community-led arts in Scotland.
To introduce her work, Jemma has provided an extract from her autumn journal, titled Work in progress on Constitution Street:
At this half-way point in my time with IASH as inaugural Community Fellow, I will be giving a work in progress talk on 1st November about my creative non-fiction project set on Constitution Street. All are welcome.
The UK feels a bruised and bruising place right now set against the dystopian reality of global politics. Active, local participation and face to face conversation is where we can re-centre the world around us and remember what we hold in common.
My street, Constitution Street, stretches east to west for half a mile, from the sea to the city and is undergoing rapid socioeconomic change of its own. The mix of architectural styles and purposes – from residential tenements and a high-rise tower block, to the industrial docks, whisky warehouses and medieval churches – all embody the constantly shifting dualities of old and new in our capital city and the waves of immigration and emigration mixing culture, language and perspective. Constitution Street is a liminal land in the current age of anxiety.
It is a place rich with history. Previous protagonists include Mary Queen of Scots, Oliver Cromwell and Rabbie Burns. However, while informed by the past, the focus of my exploration is the here and now. I’m reflecting on the spatial and temporal qualities of in between times – the best of times and the worst of times. Anxiety contains interesting information because it tells us something of who we are.
The UK does not have a written constitution. As an undergraduate at Edinburgh Law School, I was taught that constitutionality is about convention: codes, symbols and fluid interpretations of case law. Returning to the University of Edinburgh some years later, I am curious about the process of negotiating and drafting a constitution as a means of collective expression. In its 2014 White Paper on Scottish Independence, the Scottish Government proposed that a newly independent Scotland would have a written constitution incorporating the full range of international human rights – civil and political, economic, social and cultural.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be regarded as quasi-constitutional in that it is an affirmation of the fundamental values agreed by the international community. Human rights famously begin in the small places closest to home and, as with the neighbours on a street, rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent upon one another. My essays and poems from Constitution Street tell the story of our lived experiences as neighbours in relation to human rights. For example, what does the right to food mean for the allotment growers, the Kurdish café owners, and the Italian fish and chip shop family on Constitution Street? What does the right to private and family life mean for same-sex parents, new arrivals to the high-rise block and singletons in traditional tenements? What does the right to healthcare mean for pub landlords or those battling addiction?
Fieldwork interviews over the summer months challenged my assumptions and prejudices about how neighbours voted in recent referenda. Recent experiences observing the Catalan independence referendum and the refugee crisis in Greece have also made me doubt conceptions of statehood and constitutionality.
IASH supported my participation in the TRISE conference on social ecology held in Thessaloniki, Greece, last month. This hugely expanded my learning about the interconnection between human rights, environmentalism and economics. Kurdish colleagues introduced me to the work of imprisoned Kurdish leader, Abdullah Öcalan, and his non-state democratic confederalism, inspired by Murray Bookchin. This is particularly radical for those of us schooled in state to state relations. A re-imagining of the Commons – inclusive, active participation in local, place-based communities – might just help us navigate a way through the wreckage of the current neoliberal world order. Indeed, valuing community-led arts participation as part of a cultural commons was at the heart of my work at Voluntary Arts Scotland prior to this sabbatical period.
And I am in the train too now and summer is going South as I go north…
And with the rain the national conscience, creeping,
Seeping through the night
The first four months of the Fellowship have taken me from the Foot of the Walk in Leith, Edinburgh, to Aristotelous Square in Thessaloniki, and Placa Catalunya in Barcelona – meeting with ordinary people living through extraordinary times in their own small places closest to home. Mostly, I have walked up and down Constitution Street every day and I paid attention to change so that I might come to name it, and therefore to know it, and myself, better. I set out on a constitutional.
In MacNeice’s long-form poem, 'Autumn Journal', the introduction states that the poem records ‘the trivia of everyday living set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain’. The poem was written between August and December 1938 and yet it feels contemporary.
Perseverance, the Leith motto, is what we’re good at here on Constitution Street. As a northeast haar stumbles in across the Firth of Forth, we hold our collective breath in anticipation of what will come next. Recording everyday trivia lets in shards of soft autumn light. From the vantage point of my writer’s garret at IASH, in the aptly named Hope Park Square, I remain hopeful.
If you have a personal connection to the street or have an interest in a Bill of Rights for Scotland, I would love to hear from you: @jemma_tweets jemma.neville@gmail.com