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Check out our key concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.

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A Big Think article, asserting that it isn’t income inequality that is the world’s most pressing problem, but time inequality. 

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A Big Think article, asserting that it isn’t income inequality that is the world’s most pressing problem, but time inequality. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why do Dr. Marian Tupy and Dr. Gale Pooley “dissent” from this view? How does including a consideration of human knowledge change the way we calculate the level of resources available to us? What are the five reasons why thinking in terms of ‘time price’ instead of ‘money price’ provides a better insight into standards of living, and levels of inequality? Overall, ask students if they agree with the statement, “economics can be much more illuminating by going beyond money and atoms to knowledge and time”? How does this make us rethink population growth?

Key terms Limited resources, Finite, Human knowledge, Time prices, True prices

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“Time inequality” is the world’s real problem, not income inequality

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Inequality should be measured in terms of the time it takes for us to earn the money to buy the things we need.

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A Conversation article, exploring why EU information campaigns are failing to deter migrants from leaving.

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A Conversation article, exploring why EU information campaigns are failing to deter migrants from leaving.

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Why EU information campaigns are failing to deter migrants from leaving

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The argument is a familiar one: African citizens are unaware of the risks tied to the perilous journey across the Mediterranean and the West must therefore enlighten them.

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A long BBC article, considering whether national boundaries need to be rethought to help cope with the pressures of mass-migration. 

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A long BBC article, considering whether national boundaries need to be rethought to help cope with the pressures of mass-migration. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why does Gaha Vince refer to political borders as ‘inventions’? How is the climate crisis putting pressure on the world’s current borders? What are the arguments for viewing the world as a ‘global commonwealth of humanity’ - and is this a viable mindshift for people to make? How and why does Vince suggest we rethink our ‘national pride’? Overall, ask students if they agree with the following statement: In order to create a more harmonious and fully functioning world, we need to “clear from our mind the idea of people being fixed to a location they were born in, as if it affects your value as a person or your rights as an individual.”

Key terms Borders, Cleanly defined, Invention, Livability limits, Meaningless, Controlling vs. managing, Reinvent, Power, Divisive tribalism

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With up to three billion people expected to be displaced by the effects of global warming by the end of the century, should it lead to a shift in the way we think about national borders, asks Gaia Vince?
I've had an obsession with maps ever since I first sought my bearings in Winnie the Pooh's "Hundred Aker Wood", trying to discover where was "nice for piknicks", and the locations of the characters' houses. My childhood was spent studying and drawing treasure maps, charting imaginary lands and plotting routes to faraway places I longed to visit.

Today, my home is plastered with the maps I've collected or been given - reminders of places that are special to me. By my desk, I have a large world map, the continents distinguished from the oceans by their mosaic of colours. Each coloured patch is a country, separated from its neighbour by a neat line drawn onto this two-dimensional representation of our world.

The borders are cleanly defined, ink separating nationalities destined for different fates. For me, these lines mark exciting possibilities, with the potential for exploration and adventure, to visit foreign cultures with different foods and languages. For others, they are prison walls that limit all possibilities.

Borders define our fate, our life expectancy, our identity, and so much more. Yet they are an invention just like the maps I used to draw. Our borders don't exist as immutable facets of the landscape, they are not natural parts of our planet, and were invented relatively recently.

It can be argued, however, that most of these imaginary lines are not fit for the world of the 21st Century with its soaring population, dramatic climate change and resource scarcity. Indeed, the idea of keeping foreign people out using borders is relatively recent. States used to be far more concerned about stopping people from leaving than preventing their arrival. They needed their labour and taxes, and emigration still poses a headache for many states.

There are, however, true human borders set not by politics or hereditary sovereigns, but by the physical properties of our planet. These planetary borders for our mammal species are defined by geography and climate. Humans cannot live in large numbers in Antarctica or in the Sahara Desert, for instance. As global temperatures increase, causing climate change, sea level rise and extreme weather over the coming decades, large parts of the world that are home to some of the biggest populations will become increasingly hard to live in. Coastlines, island states and major cities in the tropics will be among the hardest hit, according to predictions by climate scientists.

Unable to adapt to increasingly extreme conditions, millions - or even billions - of people will need to move.

Borders are often now a barrier to movement, but might that have to change in the future? (Credit: Nicolas Economou/Getty Images)

The most densely populated areas of the planet are clustered around the 25-26th north parallels which has traditionally been the latitude of most comfortable climate and fertile land. An estimated 279 million people are packed into this thin band of land, which cuts through countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, the United States and Mexico.

But the conditions here are changing. On average, climate niches - the range of conditions at which species can normally exist - around the world are moving polewards at a pace of 1.15m (3.8ft) per day, although it's far faster in some places. Adapting to the changing climate will mean chasing our own shifting niche - which for much of human history has been within the temperature range -11C to 15C (12F to 59F) - as it migrates north from the equator. True livability limits are the borders we must worry about as the world warms over this century, bringing unbearable heat, drought, floods, fires, storms, and coastal erosion that make agriculture impossible and displace people.

Already record numbers of people are being forced to flee their homes with each passing year. In 2021, there were 89.3 million people, double the number forcibly displayed a decade ago, and in 2022 that number reached 100 million, with climate disasters displacing many more people than conflicts. Floods displaced 33 million people in Pakistan this year, while millions more in Africa have been affected by drought and the threat of famine, from the Horn of Africa to the continent's west coast.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi appealed to global leaders at the COP27 climate change conference to take bold action to tackle the humanitarian consequences of global warming. That change needs to be "transformational" according to the UNHRC. "We cannot leave millions of displaced people and their hosts to face the consequences of a changing climate alone," says Grandi.

Migrants contribute around 10% of global GDP or $6.7tn (£5.9tn)

Without action, hundreds of millions people will have to leave their homes by 2050, according some estimates. One study from 2020 predicts that by 2070, depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, " one to three billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 years".

With so many people on the move, will this mean that invented political borders, ostensibly imposed for national security, become increasingly meaningless? The threat posed by climate change and its social repercussions dwarf those surrounding national security. Heatwaves already kill more people than those who die as a direct result of violence in wars.

Compounding this, the global population is still growing, particularly in some of the regions worst hit by climate change and poverty. Populations in Africa are set to almost triple by 2100, even as those elsewhere slow in growth. This means there will be a greater number of people in the very areas that are likely to be worst affected by extreme heat, drought and catastrophic storms. A greater number of people will also need food, water, power, housing and resources, just as these become ever harder to supply.

Meanwhile, most countries in the Global North are facing a demographic crisis in which people are not having enough babies to support an ageing population. Managed mass migration could thus help with many of the world's biggest problems, reducing the number of people living in poverty and climate devastation, and helping northern economies build their workforce.

But the main barrier is our system of borders - movement restrictions either imposed by someone's own state or by the states they wish to enter. Today just over 3% of the global population are international migrants. However, migrants contribute around 10% of global GDP or $6.7tn (£5.9tn) - some $3tn (£2.6tn) more than they would have produced in their origin countries. Some economists, such as Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development in the US, calculate that enabling free movement could double global GDP. In addition, we would see an increase in cultural diversity, which studies show improves innovation. At a time when we have to solve unprecedented environmental and social challenges, it could be just what is needed.

After WW2, Britain encouraged migration from Commonwealth countries to help make up for labour shortages (Credit: Haywood Magee/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Removing borders or making them far more flexible, especially to labour flows, has the potential to improve humanity's resilience to the stresses and shocks of global climate change. Managed well, migration could benefit everyone.

What if we thought of the planet as a global commonwealth of humanity, in which people were free to move wherever they wanted? We'd need a new mechanism to manage global labour mobility far more effectively and efficiently - it is our biggest economic resource, after all. There are already wide-ranging global trade deals for the movement of other resources and products, but few that deal with labour movement.

Some 60% of the world's population is under the age of 40, half of these (and growing) under 20, and they will form most of the world's people for the rest of this century. Many of these young, energetic jobseekers are likely to be among those moving as the climate changes - will they add to economic growth to build sustainable societies, or will their talents be wasted?

The conversation about migration has become stuck on what ought to be allowed, rather than planning for what will occur. I believe nations need to move on from the idea of controlling migration to managing migration. At the very least, we need new mechanisms for lawful economic labour migration and mobility, and far better protection for those fleeing danger. Everyone could be offered an official form of United Nations citizenship in addition to their birth citizenship. For some people, such as those born in refugee camps, lacking papers, or citizens of small island states that will cease to exist later this century, UN citizenship may well be their only access to international recognition and assistance, even though citizenship is a human right. Passports could be issued on the back of this.

The political theorist David Held argued that we have outgrown our national boundaries through increasing globalisation, and now live in "overlapping communities of fate" from where we should form a cosmopolitan democracy at a global level. Today, we are experiencing a planetary crisis and I believe it is time to see ourselves as members of one globally dispersed species that must cooperate to survive. The scale of the climate crisis requires new global cooperation and, I believe, new international citizenship with global bodies for migration and for the biosphere - new authorities that are paid for by our taxes and to which nation states are accountable.

Currently, the United Nations has no executive powers over nation states, but that may well need to change if we are to bring down global temperatures, reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and restore the world's biodiversity. Global governance could also be useful in coordinating the vast new mobile workforce, perhaps using an international quota system to help allocate people to positions during the mass climate migrations of this century. But it would also face challenges created by bureaucracy, corruption and lobbying by powerful corporations.

Nations are communities that do things together - David Miller

Underpinning global governance, however, there also needs to be strong states. The tension between the desires and needs of the individual and society are very real for us all, and hard enough to reconcile when our society is a small, closely knit group, let alone the population of the whole planet. It's hard to care, for example, about a nameless, faceless stranger in a country you've never visited when making choices about your own life in a city thousands of miles from them. Most people find hard to balance the needs of a stranger one street away. Successful nation states help to manage this with structures and institutions that ensure a useful level of cooperation between strangers that nurtures a strong society in which we all can succeed. We willingly make small, daily sacrifices of time, energy and resources as individuals - paying taxes, for instance - to ensure our societies operate. Most of us do this because it's our society, our social family, our nation state.

The invention of the nation state has been a very powerful tool in enabling us to cooperate so well. As the political theorist David Miller put it: "Nations are communities that do things together."

It would seem unwise, then, to try to completely dismantle or abandon our existing geopolitical system in the brief time we have to prepare for the massive disruption that is expected to occur over the course of this century.

Only strong nation states will be capable of setting up the systems of governance that will help our species survive climate change. Only strong nation states will be able to manage a massive movement of migrants from different geographies and cultures to the native population.

It may instead require a blend between internationalism and nationalism.

In recent decades, the growth of globalisation has led to greater internationalism - a citizen of London may often feel more commonality with a citizen of Amsterdam or Taiwan than with someone from a small country town in Britain. This may not matter for many successful urbanites, but natives of more rural areas can feel left behind by their own country as once dominant industries decline, and social spaces and cultural traditions dwindle away. This creates resentment and fear of the kind that can lead to prejudice against immigrants, as was seen in parts of the UK during the Brexit debate.

Flooding in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have displaced millions of people in 2022 (Credit: Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images)

Open borders do not have to mean no borders or the abolition of nation states, though. It may be necessary to explore different types of nation states, with different governance options. Will states that are most affected by climate change buy or rent territory in safer places? Or will we see charter cities that operate under different jurisdictions and rules to the territory surrounding them, or floating states that build new territory on the waves?

It will take work to reinvent the concept of the nation state so it becomes more inclusive so that it strengthens local connections while forging greater and more equitable global networks. There are multiple benefits in encouraging commonality, a kinship with our fellows, based on our shared societal project, language and cultural works. These traits matter to people enough to make patriotism a powerful source of identity.

So why not also engender patriotic feeling about our nations' air, land and water, to encourage people to look after them.? One approach, since we all face environmental threats, might be to enlist military and other security institutions in the struggle against climate change. National service for younger citizens and immigrants to help with disaster relief, nature restoration, agricultural and social efforts could be another solidarity-creating step. And we may need to restore or invent new national traditions that are environmentally or socially beneficial, and for which citizens can feel pride and respect. These could include social groups and clubs that sing, create, play sport or perform together, and to which members can belong for life. These traditions can help maintain dignity in hard times and provide patriotic meaning for immigrants to assimilate to.

The new patriotic narrative could be about civic nationalism, based on the common good, with rights and duties, and a passionate cultural attachment to nature, and to protecting and conserving places of national (or international) importance.

Costa Rica, for instance, embraced the term pura vida, broadly meaning "good life", as a national ethos, mantra and identity. Its use became widespread from the 1970s, when refugees from the violent conflicts in neighbouring Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador relocated to the country in large numbers. Costa Rica, a small Central American country that has no standing army and instead invests heavily in nature protection and restoration alongside social services such as health and education, used this outlook on life to help define its character and integrate new immigrants.

"A person choosing to use this phrase thus is not only alluding to this shared ideology and identity, he/she is at the same time constructing that identity by means of expressing it," says Anna Marie Trester of New York University. "Language is a very important tool of self-construction."

See these lines as fusions of cultural richness, transitions rather than barriers

This offers us a new way of looking at national pride. It doesn't have to mean seeing "your people" as better than other nations', nor does it mean a centralisation of meaning and power. Instead, it can involve the devolution of traditions and an appreciation of regionality and of the enormous cultural value of new citizens. The European Union is an example of supranational identity that allows citizens to feel they are European and identify with the values of the EU, but without having to give up their national identity.

A similar idea can apply within nations as well as between them. In the UK, for instance, London's Chinatown is rightly a much-visited tourist destination, as is Little India - they are part of the nation's identity, even though Chinese Brits and British Indians often face prejudice and socioeconomic disadvantage.

To earn national pride rather than suffer divisive tribalism, a nation needs to reduce inequality. The state must invest in the people for the people to feel invested in the state. That means putting social and environmental issues first in ways that are for the benefit of all, rather than a small tribe of global aristocrats. The Green New Deals proposed in the European Union and the US are examples of policies aimed at restoring economies, providing jobs and boosting dignity while helping unite people in a bigger social project of environmental transformation.

Try, if you will, to clear from your mind the idea of people being fixed to a location they were born in, as if it affects your value as a person or your rights as an individual. As if nationality were anything more than an arbitrary line drawn on a map. See instead these lines as fusions of cultural richness, transitions rather than barriers across the possibilities that Earth's lands offer us all.

* Gaia Vince is the author of Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval and a freelance science journalist and broadcaster.

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Is the world ready for mass migration due to climate change?

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With up to three billion people expected to be displaced by climate change by 2100, does there need to be a shift in the way we think about national borders, asks Gaia Vince?

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A Guardian article, looking at the thinking behind a 170 mile long city that will be built in the Saudi Arabian desert. 

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A Guardian article, looking at the thinking behind a 170 mile long city that will be built in the Saudi Arabian desert. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE See also the trailer here. How do the arts inform the way society develops over time?

Key terms Imagination, Dystopian, Mistakes of the past, Fantasies

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he contemporary city needs a full redesign," purrs a seductive voice, over surging orchestral strings. "What if we removed cars? What if we got rid of streets? What if everything you needed was always a five-minute walk away?" The words accompany an animation depicting an oblong megastructure sprouting from a desert landscape, slicing through sand dunes and mountains in a continuous urban strip: a city of 9 million people, sealed inside a mirror-clad box. "A 170km revolution in urban living," the narrator continues, "protecting the Earth's most stunning nature, while creating unmatched liveability."

Most cities don't come with their own Hollywood-style trailers, but then most cities are not the Line. Unveiled in July, the project is the latest heady fantasy to emerge from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia's marketing machine, garnering breathless headlines and torrents of clicks ( its videos have 400m views and counting). The slick trailers promise a car-free, carbon-neutral bubble with its own temperate microclimate, where artificial intelligence will be "continuously learning predictive ways to make life easier".

The city's 500-metre-high glass walls drip with lush hanging gardens, a vision of hyper-nature taking over the buildings' pixelated glass blocks, their facades etched with circuit-board motifs, as if the metropolis itself were a habitable supercomputer. The walls frame a deep canyon sprinkled with Edenic terraces, swimming lakes and picnicking couples, all floating above a high-speed rail line ready to whisk them along the urban ribbon, safely protected from the outside world.

If it looks like something from a Marvel movie, there's a reason. The army of consultants commissioned to work on Neom, the $500bn urban region of which the Line is part, comprises not only urban planners but numerous digital artists from the special effects industry. According to a Bloomberg report, they include Olivier Pron, a designer who helped create the look of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy films; Nathan Crowley, known for his work on the brooding Dark Knight trilogy of Batman movies; and futurist Jeff Julian, who worked on the apocalyptic extravaganzas World War Z and I Am Legend. The ominous dystopian undertone to the aesthetic of the project can also be partly explained by Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman's apparent penchant for cyberpunk - a sci-fi genre, notes the Oxford English Dictionary, "typified by a bleak, hi-tech setting in which a lawless subculture exists within an oppressive society dominated by computer technology". If ever there was an urban vision that embraced our end-of-days climate apocalypse, a petrodollar mirage of horizontal glass skyscrapers in the desert as the world burns, then this is it.

The plans for the Line were instantly compared to the Continuous Monument, a theoretical project drawn up by Italian collective Superstudio in 1969, which was not a blueprint for a smart city but a searing critique of the relentless urbanisation of the planet. Their collages of a glass megastructure, ploughing through desert landscapes, cutting across oceans and engulfing Manhattan, were intended to represent a "negative utopia", according to Superstudio co-founder Adolfo Natalini, and stand as a warning against "the horrors architecture had in store, with its scientific methods for perpetuating standard models worldwide". Another Superstudio member, Gian Piero Frassinelli, was rueful in a recent interview: "Seeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created," he said, referring to the Line, "is not the best thing you could wish for."

It may now be seen as a dystopian nightmare, the far-flung folly of an autocrat desperate for global approval, but the idea of building a self-contained linear city has preoccupied the imaginations of architects and planners for generations. The Line might bill itself as a "never-before-seen approach to urbanisation", but the principles behind it have been proposed many times over - though never successfully realised.

The origins of the linear city dream are usually credited to the Spanish town planner Arturo Soria y Mata, who first articulated the concept 140 years ago. Writing in 1882, in the Madrid newspaper El Progreso, he argued that the "almost perfect" type of city would be "a single street unit 500 metres broad, extending if necessary from Cádiz to St Petersburg, from Peking to Brussels". His Ciudad Lineal imagined urban functions separated in bands either side of a central boulevard and tramway, "for every family its own house, for each house an orchard and garden," the urban strip insulated by woodland on either side. Soria even went as far as founding a tram company and buying land on the outskirts of Madrid to test out his theory. But the surrounding land values soon inflated out of reach, and his experiment gradually became swallowed up by the city.

If history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, the first tragic attempt to follow in Soria's footsteps came in 1910 in the United States. That year, Edgar Chambless took a map and a ruler, and drew a straight line from the Atlantic coast to the Allegheny mountains of West Virginia, then on to the Mississippi, across the prairies to the Rockies, and down to the beaches of the Pacific. His line represented the path of a continuous street of two-storey houses, to be built atop a triple-decker stack of railway lines, with a promenade along the rooftops, leaving untouched expanses of countryside extending for miles around on either side.

"The idea occurred to me to lay the modern skyscraper on its side," Chambless wrote. "I would take the apartment house and all its conveniences and comforts out among the farms by the aid of wires, pipes and rapid and noiseless transportation. I would extend the blotch of human habitations called cities out in radiating lines. I would surround the city worker with the trees and grass and woods and meadows, and the farmer with all the advantages of city life - I had invented Roadtown."

Just like the Line, Roadtown was premised on the lure of convenience, and the idea that the messy chaos of the city could be corralled inside a singular, sanitised strip, with "rent reduced, taxes minimised, slums exterminated". Chambless's sales pitch sounds almost identical to the Saudi scheme, describing the linear city as a hyper-connected place, joined by modern communication and "arrow-swift" noiseless transport, with "telephones, telegraphs, teleposts, parcel-carriers, freight service, compact, punctual, prompt, accurate, enabling you to live along the line from part to part and from end to end, and be served with the best at the cheapest at all times, while sitting in your easy chair".

Roadtown was enthusiastically backed by Thomas Edison, who donated his patents for moulded-cement housing, and the inventor William H Boyes, who gifted his monorail invention. But, as with Soria's scheme, wider support was unforthcoming. Undeterred, Chambless continued to promote his project for the next two decades, entering his plan to the 1939 New York World's Fair competition, suggesting that the fair itself should be built around transportation, with prefabricated buildings to prevent waste. His submission went unanswered, and he killed himself in 1936.

While Chambless's vision was an embodiment of the American dream of freedom, mobility and man's triumph over the land, the idea of the linear city was also taking root among radical architects of the Soviet Union around the same time, driven by a very different ideology. Mikhail Okhitovich, a constructivist theorist and town planner, rejected the centralised city as a product of capitalism. Instead, he championed the idea of " disurbanism ", plotting cities in the form of long ribbons of decentralised development, as a means of populating the country's sprawling rural hinterland with self-sufficient settlements. Housing would be dispersed along linear routes, with communal dining, leisure facilities and employment centres at major road junctions.

Okhitovich put his ideas to the test in 1930, in a competition proposal for Magnitogorsk, an industrial city named after its "magnetic mountain" of iron ore. He imagined a network of eight 25km-long ribbons, along which the city's resident-workers would live in individual "pod-houses" that could be easily reconfigured, the ribbons converging on a giant iron and steel works. Children would receive their own separate pods, with the aim of dissolving traditional family structures, while a divorce would no longer entail haggling over property - you could simply decouple your pods and go your own way.

But Okhitovich's disurbanist thinking was rejected as economically crippling and politically dangerous. He was reprimanded by the politburo for speaking out against the Stalinist "cult of hierarchy" and sent to the gulag, where he was executed in 1937.

While Chambless was peddling Roadtown across America, and Okhitovich imagining urban ribbons snaking through the Ural mountains, the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, maestro of megalomaniacal urban plans, was busy drawing up a linear city of his own. In 1931, to mark the centennial of French rule in Algeria, the colonial government unveiled a new city plan for the capital, Algiers. Le Corbusier saw it as a sorely missed opportunity - and a promotional opportunity for himself to offer a more radical vision. Without any official commission, he concocted Plan Obus, a wildly implausible scheme that included a vast elevated highway winding between the hills, with 14 storeys of housing for the working class stuffed underneath it, like a kind of inhabited viaduct, with room for 180,000 people.

"Here is the new Algiers," he declared. "Instead of the leprous sore which had sullied the gulf and the slopes of the Sael, here stands architecture."

Le Corbusier's brutal intervention in the landscape was strangely at odds with his professed appreciation of the local vernacular. "O inspiring image!" he wrote, stirred by the sight of the dense, cubic architecture of the city's casbah. "Arabs, are there no peoples but you who dwell in coolness and quiet, in the enchantment of proportions and the savour of a humane architecture?" Yet, at the same time, his plan advocated razing more than half of the casbah to make way for a new business centre. Thankfully, his inflated colonial ambitions remained just that.

Despite these failures, linear city fever returned in the 1960s, fuelled by a wave of postwar techno-utopian optimism, and the firm belief that infrastructure could cure the ills of the overcrowded metropolis. In 1961, Japanese architect Kenzō Tange presented his scheme for the future of Tokyo Bay on national television, and, in doing so, triggered among architects a thirst for megastructures that would last for the next two decades. He proposed an 80km urban spine stretching across the bay, with city modules connected by three levels of looping roads, and modular buildings clipped on to the highway skeleton - a plug-and-play system that could be easily updated as and when needed. As with Roadtown before it, Tange's plan was based on a firm belief that communication and mobility would inevitably shape the future city in linear form.

"Mass communication has released the city from the bonds of a closed organisation and is changing the structure of society itself," he proclaimed. "It is the arterial system which preserves the life and human drive of the city, the nervous system which moves its brain. Mobility determines the structure of the city." Just as the cathedral had stood at the symbolic centre of the medieval city, so would his "civic axis" provide the new organisational spine of the modern metropolis. In fine tradition, his proposals remained firmly on paper, although they went on to inspire the Japanese metabolist movement, which would conjure ever more feverish sci-fi plans, the linear city sprouting branches and blooming into vertical clusters of inhabited trees.

Back in the US, the evangelical belief in roads as the saviour of cities continued apace. In 1965, young architects Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves imagined a linear city that would stretch all the way from Boston to Washington DC, built on a podium of multi-deck highways. Depicted without any of the seductive finesse of Tange's plan, the architects' vision included a pair of spartan oblong blocks, one for industry, the other for housing, offices and shops, looking like an infinite extrusion of a generic office-cum-mall. The idea, they wrote, was that these urban "corridors" might join existing cities from Maine to Miami, like links in an endless chain.

"The final result could be a system which at once would send the longest manmade structure ever seen on earth snaking across its horizons," cooed Life magazine, "and at the same time make it possible to conduct most urban activities within distances a man enjoys to walk." The article noted that the linear form "would avoid any cross-town traffic jams" - conveniently overlooking the fact that the city itself would probably be one gigantic linear traffic jam, stretching up the entire eastern seaboard.

So will The Line succeed where other linear city dreams before it have failed, or is it merely set to repeat the mistakes of the past, on an epic scale? In the deserts of northwestern Saudi Arabia, a faint linear furrow is already visible from the air. Time will tell if it becomes anything more than that, or if it remains a line in the sand, an Ozymandian bookend to 140 years of deluded urban fantasies.

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Nine million people in a city 170km long; will the world ever be ready for a linear metropolis?

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he contemporary city needs a full redesign," purrs a seductive voice, over surging orchestral strings. "What if we removed cars? What if we got rid of streets? What if everything you needed was always a five-minute walk away?"

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A long but useful Aeon article, discussing the extent to which we can solve ethical problems via mathematical logic. 

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A long but useful Aeon article, discussing the extent to which we can solve ethical problems via mathematical logic. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How should mathematics not be used to resolve ethical issues? Why is it important that ‘moral mathematics’ is practical, and responsive to uncertainty? How can moral mathematics support longtermism? How convincing do you find the evidence and examples offered by the author? Overall, do you agree that “Moral mathematics forces precision and clarity… And it helps us draw conclusions from our ethical assumptions”?

Key terms Moral concepts vs. quantitative concepts, Decision-making, Practical, Uncertainty, Objective, Longtermism

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How to solve moral problems with formal logic and probability | Aeon Essays

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Subjecting the problems of ethics to the cool quantifications of logic and probability can help us to be better people

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 A New York Times story, exploring the stark difference in the way the Greek migrant boat sinking, and the Titan submersible implosion, were reported. 

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 A New York Times story, exploring the stark difference in the way the Greek migrant boat sinking, and the Titan submersible implosion, were reported. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why have many people commented on the role of status and race in determining the way the two stories were told in the media? What examples does the article give to indicate that it is not only status and race that leads to coverage in the news? What point is made about the fact that we find it easier to feel compassion for individual victims - and what is the relevance of this? How does ‘compassion fatigue’ affect the way we process the news? To wrap up: How do we ensure that we remain objective and compassionate about tragic events and issues going on in the world?

KEY TERMS Class and ethnicity, Unequal treatment, Degree of familiarity, Compassion fatigue

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5 Deaths at Sea Gripped the World. Hundreds of Others Got a Shrug.

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Many see harsh realities about class and ethnicity in the attention paid to the Titan submersible and the halfhearted attempts to aid a ship before it sank, killing hundreds of migrants. But there are other factors.

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A Conversation article*, exploring the difficulties of reconciling the moral obligations of a religious faith with the laws of the society in which it exists.  

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A Conversation article*, exploring the difficulties of reconciling the moral obligations of a religious faith with the laws of the society in which it exists.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What examples does it offer of tensions between immigration policies and religious groups’ commitments to humanitarian care? What arguments do some religious leaders accused of breaking immigration laws present to defend their actions? What does this story indicate about the different priorities for governments and religious traditions? Overall, which perspective should take precedent when we form our moral outlooks on the world: the religion, or the state, to which we belong? How can they be reconciled when they clash?

KEY TERMS Religious freedoms, Violated, Motivations, Cultural, Globalizing world

*We're proud to work in partnership with The Conversation. To sign up for their newsletter, which we draw on widely to create TOK lesson material, follow this link.

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Many religious traditions preach the need to care for strangers. But what happens when caring for the stranger comes into conflict with government policy?

After Title 42 restrictions at the U.S. border ended on May 11, 2023, debates about immigration have heated up again - focused mostly on reform, border security or refugees' needs.

But the treatment of immigrants is deeply intertwined with religious freedom as well. As a scholar of religious ethics who studies immigration, I am interested in recent cases that highlight growing tensions between immigration policies and religious groups' commitments to pastoral and humanitarian care.

Ministry at the border

One high-profile example centers on Rev. Kaji Douša, senior pastor at Park Avenue Christian Church in New York City, who traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, in 2018 to provide pastoral care to asylum seekers.

Her work was flagged by Customs and Border Protection after a Honduran woman allegedly said that Douša told migrants that marrying each other would make it easier to receive legal papers in the U.S. As Douša later testified, she did perform religious ceremonies, but only for couples who were already in common-law marriages and without claiming to provide any legal status.

Douša's name and photo were added to a Department of Homeland Security watch list that included lawyers, journalists and activists, and she was detained and questioned by CBP officers upon her return to the U.S. A CBP official also sent an email to Mexican authorities asking them to ban Douša from entering Mexico because she lacked proper documentation - which the official later acknowledged had no basis in fact.

Douša filed a lawsuit accusing DHS of unjust surveillance and retaliation, and in March 2023 a federal judge ruled in her favor. Judge Todd Robinson agreed that DHS had violated Douša's right to freedom of religious expression by instructing Mexican authorities to detain her.

Both Douša and the United Church of Christ, which ordained her, argued that her actions were based in her religious commitments. Douša previously stated, "To reject a migrant is to cast away God's angels, which I am unwilling to do."

Shifts in the legal landscape

This is not the first time religious leaders or groups providing pastoral and humanitarian care to migrants have come under scrutiny.

One famous example is the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, an informal network of up to 500 churches whose members provided safe haven to undocumented asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America.

Several members of the movement were convicted of conspiring to smuggle immigrants into the U.S. They appealed, arguing that their work was inspired by their religious convictions and that the government was violating their First Amendment rights. Yet their claims were largely unsuccessful.

Over the past few decades, however, religious freedom claims have often found more favor in U.S. courts.

In part, this is because of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has made it easier for people and institutions to claim religiously based exemptions from generally applicable laws. One of the best-known examples is the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the court, citing the owners' religious convictions, exempted the national chain of crafts stores from providing employee health insurance that included contraception coverage.

Help on the ground

This shift has opened new lines of defense for religious actors, including humanitarian groups.

No More Deaths is a nonprofit associated with a Unitarian Universalist church in Tucson, Arizona. Members leave supplies along desert routes traveled by migrants, provide first aid and occasionally offer services such as temporary shelter to migrants who are suffering from exposure.

In 2018, volunteers were charged with littering, driving on protected lands and, in one case, harboring undocumented immigrants.

Four volunteers were initially convicted, but their charges were dismissed after they argued that they were compelled by religious convictions and that the government had violated their freedom of religious expression. The appeals court judge cited the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as well as the Hobby Lobby case in holding that the volunteers were protected under U.S. law.

A more recent dustup between a religious humanitarian organization and government officials occurred in December 2022. A group of Republicans in Congress sent a letter to Catholic Charities, a humanitarian nonprofit affiliated with the church that provides food, shelter and bathing facilities on both sides of the border.

In U.S. border cities, the organization also provides transportation from shelters to bus stops and money exchanges. The representatives' letter cited this work as a reason to suspect Catholic Charities of encouraging illegal border crossings and required staff to preserve records of their work.

The organization argued that the charges were " both fallacious and factually inaccurate." Caring for people in need, "including vulnerable people on the move," leaders wrote, "is a part of the fabric of the global Catholic Church and is mandated by the gospel."

Yet another sticking point between religious groups and immigration law has emerged in Florida in recent weeks. A bill recently signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis was modified after religious groups protested against its proposed criminal penalties for knowingly transporting or concealing an undocumented immigrant. Religious leaders argued that this would violate their religious freedom by preventing them from providing rides to religious services or from finding aid for people in need.

National vs. universal mandates

It is not surprising that these conflicts keep happening, considering the U.S. government's and religious organizations' different motivations around migration.

One main driver for politicians is simply that many voters are nervous about newcomers, especially if they have different cultural, religious or racial backgrounds. The nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute has found that while 55% of Americans think immigrants strengthen American society, 40% believe a growing number of newcomers "threatens traditional American customs and values." In the past few years, multiple Republican politicians have even embraced some version of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory. Once limited to extremist and antisemitic groups, replacement theory alleges that immigrants are either replacing native-born American citizens or are intentionally being used to facilitate electoral and social change.

Political scientist Seyla Benhabib has argued that another reason some leaders focus on border policies is that national sovereignty has been weakened in a globalizing world. Multinational corporations, for example, are sometimes influential enough to shape government policies, such as lobbying for weaker labor laws and environmental protections.

But whereas sovereignty and citizens are priorities for governments, many religious traditions teach adherents to care for people regardless of what community they belong to. Religious thinkers do argue over whether their traditions encourage greater attention to people in their own communities. Still, when it comes to people's most basic survival needs, most emphasize that care should know no borders.

For the foreseeable future, these priorities will continue to clash - and some religious people may push back by claiming a First Amendment right to freedom of religious expression.

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When faith says to help migrants - and the law says don't

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As governments crack down at their borders, religious groups' teachings to help the stranger remain unchanged.

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A CNN report, asserting that a Fox News report about the migrant crisis in the USA made false claims by presenting events out of context. 

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A CNN report, asserting that a Fox News report about the migrant crisis in the USA made false claims by presenting events out of context. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do we know when we are being presented with information out of its correct context?

Key terms False claims, Out of context

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Carlson played Biden sound out of context. Hear what Biden really said | CNN Business

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CNN’s Don Lemon says Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is using what’s happening at the border to push a theory that falsely claims that white Americans are being intentionally replaced by Black and brown migrants.

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This Big Think article deconstructs how maps are used to show the migration of people, and how their language and designs are often loaded with meaning. 

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This Big Think article deconstructs how maps are used to show the migration of people, and how their language and designs are often loaded with meaning. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Get students to study the red and blue maps, and see how their understanding of immigration alters. They could produce their own maps with the same data, experimenting with colour, icons, and other graphic representations. Overall, how possible is it to present data objectively? Do biases always interfere?

Key terms Objective data, Preconceptions

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One map can say more than a thousand words. That's why we shouldn't believe all they're telling us. See, maps have a problem. They appear neutral, objective, authoritative. But that's exactly all that they're not. Each map reflects the many choices the cartographer has made, consciously or not, both in terms of content and form.

And so, without us even noticing it, maps can confirm bias, entrench prejudice and perpetuate injustice. Take for instance the topic of migration, guaranteed to raise the volume of the after-dinner conversation at any party. In a recent article, Dutch news website De Correspondent argues that the cartographic depiction of migrant flows into Europe reinforces the negative attitudes many Europeans have towards migrants.

Image: Frontex - Risk Analysis for 2020

Here's a map taken from the 2020 annual report by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, showing the illegal border crossings into the EU for 2019. As part of the official report on illegal immigration, this map is the source of many others in the European media.

While it may seem nothing more or less than a factually correct cartographic representation of objective data contained in the report, De Correspondent argues that there are several things wrong with this image.

The arrows are reminiscent of battlefield maps, suggesting that Europe is under attack. This is aggravated by the use of the color red, which signals danger.

The arrows are huge - larger than some countries. This homogenises a diverse group of people, and inflates the perceived size of the issue.

The 'straightness' of the arrows indicates a clear purpose; but most migrants experience a much more circuitous and dangerous path, not always concluded successfully (or alive).

The title refers to 'illegal border crossings', not mentioning that migrants hardly have legal means of entering the EU.

This all serves to affirm certain preconceptions about migration into Europe: the continent is being flooded by a huge influx of hostile aliens. "It's no coincidence that political parties opposed to migration use maps like these in their communication," the article states.

Image: De Correspondent, reproduced with kind permission.

Can maps confer the same information without confirming those biases? De Correspondent took the Frontex map and translated it into its own house style; and then produced a kinder, gentler alternative:

The colour is a more soothing blue rather than the aggressive red.

The map's new title ("These are the routes via which irregular migrants reach the EU") no longer focuses on the illegal aspect of the entries.

The military-style arrows are replaced by circles.

While the 'blue' map at least makes an active effort not to walk into the same bias-confirming trap that the 'red' one does, it still tells only part of the story. No mention is made of the conflicts that motivate migrants to risk their lives in journeying to Europe - nor indeed of the many lives lost along those routes.

Image: De Correspondent, reproduced with kind permission.

Perhaps a map is not the right way at all to present information on migration, De Correspondent argues. Here's another illustration: a simple bar chart, showing the number of irregular border crossings for each of the preceding six years. Following the dramatic refugee influx of 2015, that number has gone down significantly and consistently for each of the following years.

This offers a radically different perspective on the same reality - and one less likely to be reproduced by anti-immigration parties.
For more background (and more maps), see the original article at De Correspondent (in Dutch), which was based on an article in the journal Mobilities: The migration map trap. On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migration (in English). Strange Maps #1045 Got a strange map? Let me know at [email protected] .

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One map can say more than a thousand words. That's why we shouldn't believe all they're telling us. See, maps have a problem. They appear neutral, objective, authoritative. But that's exactly all that they're not. Each map reflects the many choices the cartographer has made, consciously or not, both in terms of content and form.

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An Aeon animation, portraying US immigration as rings on a developing tree. Is this a helpful way of communicating the reality of this phenomenon? 

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An Aeon animation, portraying US immigration as rings on a developing tree. Is this a helpful way of communicating the reality of this phenomenon? 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What insight (if any) do we gain from this that we don’t from looking at straight statistics? Why do you think the creators of this animation chose to represent immigration in the form of a tree - and how does that influence the way we process the data?

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With the overheated rhetoric around immigration dominating the political sphere, an imaginative, historically rooted perspective can be something of a tonic. This short video from Pedro M Cruz, a data-visualisation designer and assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, uses nearly two centuries of United States census data (1830-2015) to convey the country's population growth through immigration. Cruz depicts these accumulating figures as an ageing tree trunk, with each new ring accounting for a decade of population growth, and each coloured cell representing 100 immigrants from a cultural-geographical region. According to Cruz, the tree metaphor 'carries the idea that these marks in the past are immutable' and it 'embodies the concept that all cells contributed to the organism's growth'. As with so many renderings of US history, indigenous populations are conspicuously absent from the tableau. Still, Cruz's skilfully deployed data doubles as a resonant work of cultural commentary, offering a rich and often surprising look at the ever-evolving makeup of the country.

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For a radical new perspective on immigration, picture the US as an ancient tree | Aeon Videos

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With the overheated rhetoric around immigration dominating the political sphere, an imaginative, historically rooted perspective can be something of a tonic. This short video from Pedro M Cruz, a data-visualisation designer and assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, uses nearly two centuries of United States census data (1830-2015) to convey the country's population growth through immigration.

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An Aeon essay, looking at six different narratives of the nature and effect of globalization. 

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An Aeon essay, looking at six different narratives of the nature and effect of globalization. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE First, what are students’ thoughts on the effects of globalization? Which of the six narratives does this most closely align to? Do they agree with the author that these are each “narrative contains some truth but does not tell the whole truth”? How does applying a ‘fox-like approach’ help us to ‘embrace multiple perspectives’? Should we become ‘foxes’ in all areas of knowledge?

Key terms Fox vs. hedgehog, Perspectives, Polarization, Truth

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Isaiah Berlin understood the parable of the fox and the hedgehog - 'the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing' - to illustrate two styles of thinking. Hedgehogs relate everything to a single vision, a universally applicable organising principle for understanding the world. Foxes, on the other hand, embrace many values and approaches rather than trying to fit everything into an all-encompassing singular vision.

Debates about economic globalisation are often dominated by hedgehogs - actors who interpret and evaluate the dynamics and consequences of globalisation through a single lens. Take the narrative that dominated the debate about globalisation in the West from the collapse of the Soviet Union until the global financial crisis in 2008. On this view, economic liberalisation promised to grow the pie so that everyone - developed and developing countries, rich and poor - would be better off. This confident perspective touted free trade as a win-win outcome that would create peace and prosperity for all.

In recent years, this view has been challenged by a variety of narratives that stress that economic globalisation produces many losers. Right-wing populists lament the decay of America's rust belt, warning of the need to protect the native working class against the offshoring of manufacturing jobs and the onshoring of immigrants. Left-wing populists and critics of corporate power protest that globalisation's advantages often accrue mainly to rich people and powerful multinationals, hollowing out the middle class. The COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis have heightened anxiety about the resilience and sustainability of our economies.

We are at a critical juncture: a relatively long period of stability in mainstream thinking about economic globalisation has given way to a situation of dramatic flux. During such periods, narratives assume particular relevance because they offer new ways for actors to understand what the problem is and what should be done about it.

The interplay of different narratives could be the starting point of a nuanced appraisal of the complexities, uncertainties and ambiguities of economic globalisation. More often, however, debates about economic globalisation devolve into stand-offs among hedgehogs who emphasise the validity of their perspective while seeking to expose their opponents as economically illiterate, politically dangerous or morally bankrupt.

A prime example of such a standoff was the reaction by establishment figures to the critiques of free trade and immigration that animated Donald Trump's presidential campaign in the United States and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom. Many curled up into a ball of spikes, disparaging opponents for their stupidity and self-interest. But proponents of the insurgent narratives have been no less at fault: they have drawn much of their energy from their ability to present a radically different perspective, often at the cost of nuance and a willingness to compromise.

None of this is to say that the perspectives brought to light by the hedgehogs are not valid and valuable. Some of them harness the empirical and theoretical tools of particular academic disciplines to build our knowledge of the global economy, polity and environment. Others articulate a particular value system and spell out its ethical ramifications for organising the global flow of goods, people, capital, data and ideas. Each of these perspectives expresses a different viewpoint and sheds light on a piece of the puzzle.

Yet debates dominated by hedgehogs hinder us from moving forward. These debates tend to oscillate between two extremes. On some issues, proponents of different narratives seem to inhabit different worlds, with little or no interaction (silos). Some know a lot about inequality, for instance, but little about great-power competition or how the two might relate. At other times, the advocates of rival approaches clash forcefully, but the sides are so deeply entrenched in their own worldviews that genuine dialogue seems impossible (polarisation).

In order to grapple with complex issues such as economic globalisation, we need to develop more fox-like approaches that seek to overcome the silos and polarisation that are the hallmark of contemporary debates. The fact that hedgehogs have been dominating public debates about economic globalisation not only impedes our understanding of complex phenomena but makes it difficult for us to appreciate and accommodate the different values at stake. It is time for a more foxy approach.

The first step to developing such an approach is to understand what the hedgehogs have been saying about economic globalisation. In our book Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters (2021), we identify six main narratives driving debates in the West about the virtues and vices of economic globalisation. These narratives provide the storylines through which people perceive reality and communicate their understandings and values. They fall into three broad categories: win-win, win-lose and lose-lose narratives.

The establishment narrative has been the dominant frame for understanding economic globalisation in the West over the past three decades. It sees globalisation as an unstoppable but overwhelmingly beneficial force. It focuses on rising productivity and declining poverty rates, emphasising economic efficiency and the virtues of countries and companies playing to their comparative advantage. This 'everybody wins' view has been espoused by many institutions that serve as the guardians of the international economic order, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.

The establishment narrative has now been dislodged from its dominant position. In the decade following the global financial crisis, previously marginalised narratives have made their way to the centre of political debate. While the establishment narrative assumes that everyone wins, four other hedgehog narratives argue that economic globalisation produces both winners and losers. Where they differ is in who wins and who loses, what causes these distributive outcomes, and why they are problematic.

On the Left of the political spectrum, we see two narratives that emphasise how gains from economic globalisation have flowed upward to rich individuals and multinational corporations. On the Right of the political spectrum, we find two narratives that see the gains from globalisation flowing sideways to foreigners and foreign countries.

The Left-wing populist narrative focuses on the ways in which national economies are rigged to channel the gains from globalisation to the privileged few. Even as countries have seen their economies grow, many have also experienced a sharp increase in inequality, with a growing divide between rich and poor and a hollowing-out of the middle class. Whereas some proponents point the finger at chief executive officers, bankers and billionaires (the top 1 per cent of the global population), others take aim at the educated professional class and the upper middle class more broadly (the top 20 per cent). Either way, the poor and working class have lost out.

Proponents of the related corporate power narrative argue that the real winners from economic globalisation are multinational corporations, which can take advantage of a global marketplace to produce cheaply, sell everywhere, and pay as little in taxes as possible. These companies use their power to shape international rules in areas that advantage them, such as trade and investment, while lobbying against effective international cooperation on subjects that might disadvantage them, such as taxation. According to this narrative, economic globalisation produces many losers - workers, communities, citizens, governments - but only one winner: corporations.

The sixth hedgehog narrative argues that we are all at risk of losing from economic globalisation

The Right-wing populist narrative shares with the Left-wing version a deep distrust of elites, but the two narratives part company on what they blame the elite for: whereas Left-wing populists fault the elite for enriching themselves, Right-wing populists deride the elite for failing to protect the hardworking native population from threats posed by an external 'other'. The Right-wing populist narrative thus has a strong horizontal us-versus-them quality, whether expressed through concern about protecting workers from the offshoring of jobs or guarding them against an inflow of immigrants who might compete for those jobs, live off the welfare system, or threaten the native community's sense of identity.

The geoeconomic narrative focuses on a different kind of external threat: the economic and technological competition between the US and China as great-power rivals. Although both countries have gained from economic globalisation in absolute terms, in relative terms China has closed the gap on the US. The US increasingly perceives China as both an economic competitor and a security threat, lending the geoeconomic narrative an urgency that it did not have during the Cold War. Instead of applauding international trade and investment as enhancing economic welfare and increasing prospects for peace, the geoeconomic narrative emphasises the security vulnerabilities created by economic interdependence and digital connectivity with a strategic rival.

Sometimes these different narratives overlap. For instance, many members of the Trump administration embraced both the Right-wing populist narrative and the geoeconomic one, while presidential candidates such as Elizabeth Warren embodied both the Left-wing populist critique and the corporate power one. At other times they diverge. For instance, the protests against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership in Europe were much more strongly motivated by the corporate power narrative than the Left-wing populist one. Different narratives focus on different concerns. While the Right-wing populist narrative laments the loss of the manufacturing jobs of the past, the geoeconomic one focuses on winning the race in the technologies of the future, such as fifth-generation (5G) networks and artificial intelligence.

These win-win and win-lose narratives differ from the sixth hedgehog narrative, which argues that we are all at risk of losing from economic globalisation in its current form. This lose-lose narrative portrays economic globalisation as a source and accelerator of global threats such as pandemics and the climate crisis. Some versions focus on how global connectivity increases the risk of contagion of both viruses and supply chain shocks. Others warn that the skyrocketing carbon emissions associated with the global diffusion of Western patterns of production and consumption are endangering both people and the planet.

This global threats narrative emphasises our shared humanity; its proponents call for global solidarity and international cooperation in the face of common challenges. They argue that we need to redefine the goals of our economies to enable individuals and societies to survive and thrive within the limits of our planet. This can mean emphasising resilience over efficiency in our supply chains and sustainability over profit-seeking in our economies. Without change, they warn, we run the risk that everybody loses - though some people and countries are likely to lose first and worst.

Trained in a world that values hedgehogs, the most common question we encountered in our research was 'So, which narrative is correct?' We also found that proponents of the individual narratives were quick to point out the ways in which their narrative was right and others wrong - a classic hedgehog move. Both approaches missed a deeper point.

As with any partial representation of a more complex reality, each narrative contains some truth but does not tell the whole truth. Each narrative highlights important aspects of the process of economic globalisation and expresses values that are deeply held by significant numbers of people. Each narrative reveals and obscures. Rather than defending one narrative as the correct one, we need to adopt more fox-like approaches that embrace multiple perspectives, holding them in tension and combining their insights.

At the analytical level, adopting a more fox-like approach helps in developing better understandings of complex issues. As the political scientist Philip E Tetlock explains in his book Expert Political Judgment (2005), what experts think matters far less than how they think. Tetlock finds that hedgehog-like thinkers who know one big thing are often overly confident and inclined to (over)extend the explanatory reach of their expertise into new domains. Yet they are often far less accurate in their predictions than fox-like thinkers who stitch together diverse sources of information to produce more provisional conclusions.

Take the backlash against the French president Emmanuel Macron's diesel tax as an example. From the perspective of the establishment and global threats narratives, the tax made perfect sense: making fossil fuels more expensive is a market-based way of reducing carbon emissions. The policy failed, however, because Macron did not consider how the tax would appear from the populist perspectives that fuelled the 'yellow vest' protests. Right-wing populists saw the tax as an affront to rural ways of life by city-dwelling elites, while Left-wing populists noted how it burdened poorer populations without equally targeting the habits of the rich, such as flying.

If the art of advocacy lies in convincing others to view the world through the lens of your preferred narrative, the art of policymaking requires examining issues through diverse lenses. The question of whether a country should use the telecommunications company Huawei for its 5G networks is not just about whether Huawei's products are cheap, reliable and economically efficient; it is also about whether a country is comfortable entrusting its critical infrastructure to a company that is subject to the Chinese government in an era of increased security concerns and geopolitical rivalry. Similarly, understanding the spread and impact of the virus SARS-CoV-2 requires an appreciation of the systemic risks arising from global connectivity as well as the variability resulting from domestic inequalities.

The synthesising mind takes in information from disparate sources, knitting it together into a more coherent whole

A fox-like approach can also help overcome some of the mutual incomprehension that plagues economic debates. A fox-like approach encourages us to step into the shoes of the proponents of narratives with which we disagree. It does not require us to adopt their narrative - we may still contest some of the narrative's empirical claims, value judgments and policy prescriptions. But if we attempt to see economic globalisation through the lens of another narrative in a charitable and empathetic way, we will gain a better understanding of that narrative's internal logic, appeal and prescriptions, and a clearer vision of the blind spots and biases of our own preferred narratives and policy options.

To develop more fox-like approaches, we need to get better at integrative thinking. This is difficult in today's environment. Universities typically organise their research and teaching along disciplinary lines and thereby encourage depth, specialisation and mastery over breadth, connectivity and creativity. Policymakers often work in a relatively siloed fashion as different departments take charge of a problem and keep a tight hold of the drafting pen. Yet complex phenomena such as economic globalisation involve a multitude of interconnected issues that do not fall neatly within the disciplinary and subject-matter lines along which much of our knowledge production is organised.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann was of the view that: 'In the 21st century, the most important kind of mind will be the synthesising mind.' The synthesising mind takes in and evaluates information from disparate sources, knitting it together into a more coherent whole. The ability to hold (at least) two diametrically opposed ideas or narratives in one's head and, instead of simply picking one, produce a synthesis that is superior to either has been found to be a common quality among exceptional business leaders. Increasingly, we are seeing trade policies in Washington, DC, Brussels and beyond that seek to integrate insights from different perspectives instead of simply championing the establishment narrative or replacing it wholesale with another narrative.

Although Trump's defeat revived optimism among some commentators about a reset on economic globalisation, the new US president Joe Biden's approach integrates insights from multiple narratives. Biden's trade agenda embraces the establishment narrative's enthusiasm for trade's potential to generate prosperity while tempering it with a commitment to prioritising the welfare of US workers (a concern of both Right-wing and Left-wing populists), an awareness of the need for greater regulation of corporate power (including in the areas of taxation and antitrust), and a determination to compete aggressively with China economically and technologically while attempting to cooperate on global threats such as the climate crisis and pandemics. The Biden administration has continued many of Trump's protectionist and geoeconomic trade policies, while also seeking to work with allies and reaching out to China on issues of common interest, such as the climate crisis.

Similar movements are evident in Brussels. Long a staunch proponent of the establishment narrative, the European Union has been updating its trade policy to achieve greater resilience with respect to critical goods, spearhead its own semiconductor manufacturing to protect its industrial position, and impose a carbon border adjustment mechanism to pursue greater sustainability within a global trading system. Europe is also seeking to incorporate insights from different narratives in its approach to China, with the European Commission declaring that:

China is, simultaneously, in different policy areas, a cooperation partner with whom the EU has closely aligned objectives, a negotiating partner with whom the EU needs to find a balance of interests, an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.

If we move past either/or arguments about which narrative is right, where might more integrative thinking about economic globalisation lead us? Although we do not have a definite answer, our survey of competing hedgehog narratives suggests that the debate's centre of gravity is shifting away from the old establishment consensus in at least two respects: questions of distribution, both within and between countries, are increasingly central; and noneconomic values, whether environmental, social or security-related, are increasingly qualifying or outweighing a primary focus on efficiency and growth.

When it comes to distributive questions, advocates of the establishment narrative traditionally endorsed a two-step approach. The first imperative was to maximise the size of the pie by opening markets to international trade and investment. Distributional questions about how the pie was divided were left to the domestic level. Economic thinking in this mould focused on increasing efficiency so as to promote economic growth for the country as a whole. A growing economy meant that the winners could compensate the losers and still be better off. Whether the winners actually did compensate the losers was a matter for messy politics rather than elegant models.

A common theme that emerges from the other narratives is that distribution is highly significant. It is not enough to increase the size of the pie; the way the pie is sliced is just as important, and sometimes more so. Left-wing populists zero in on the distribution of wealth and opportunity among socioeconomic classes within a particular country. For them, growth is pointless if it is not broadly shared. The Right-wing populist narrative argues that distribution also matters horizontally in geographic space. It contrasts dynamic cities that move ahead with rural communities that decay when factories close.

Relative gains may also be important at the international level. The geoeconomic narrative notes that, although China and the US both gained from economic globalisation in absolute terms, China's relative success in closing the gap has sharpened strategic competition between the two. Instead of producing a win-win situation that increased peace and prosperity for all, the changing global balance of power now threatens peace and prosperity. Distributional questions, both within and among countries, are becoming central to policymaking.

We need to find ways to more openly discuss and balance different values in our pluralistic societies

Another common theme in the narratives pushing back against the free-trade orthodoxy is the focus on values other than economic efficiency, whether they be human wellbeing, environmental protection, community cohesion or national security. The establishment narrative tends to either ignore nonmonetary values or treat them as reducible to economic measures. The challenger narratives argue that overall 'welfare' cannot be represented solely in economic metrics; sometimes other values are more important than wealth and might not be commensurable with money. Even if disability payments, welfare handouts and cheaper products mean that laid-off manufacturing workers are materially better off than their parents, what they have lost in pride and status will likely outweigh any material gains.

The idea that values other than wealth maximisation matter is an essential element of the global threats discourse. Environmentalists and their allies ask us to recast economic growth as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. They remind us that not all economic growth contributes to human wellbeing, especially when it is pursued without respect for planetary boundaries. 'Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive,' notes the economist Kate Raworth; 'what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.'

Noneconomic values also animate the other challenger narratives. The Right-wing populist narrative prizes the ties that bind families, communities and nations, and it values tradition, stability, loyalty and hierarchy. Its advocates see work as important not just for providing an income but also for conferring a sense of identity, self-worth and dignity, which in turn helps in building stable families and communities. Even if trade encourages greater efficiency and cheaper production, it can damage the social fabric, particularly when change is rapid and highly concentrated in specific geographic regions or industrial sectors.

Sometimes economic growth is helpful in achieving these noneconomic goals; sometimes it stands in tension with achieving them. Proponents of these nonestablishment narratives concur that we cannot focus solely on growing the size of the pie or even on dividing it fairly - we must also acknowledge that the things that we value might not form part of a single pie. This conclusion means that we need to find ways to more openly discuss and balance different values in our pluralistic societies. As the philosopher Michael Sandel explains:

Liberal neutrality flattens questions of meaning, identity, and purpose into questions of fairness. It therefore misses the anger and resentment that animate the populist revolt; it lacks the moral and rhetorical and sympathetic resources to understand the cultural estrangement, even humiliation, that many working-class and middle-class voters feel; and it ignores the meritocratic hubris of elites.

There is no one view that accurately captures the virtues and vices of globalisation. Instead of buying into the worldview of a single hedgehog narrative, we need to develop more fox-like ways of thinking about complex issues. This approach requires an ability to appreciate the insights of and values held by proponents of different narratives, as well as a culture of respectful debate where different tradeoffs are openly assessed. How should we weigh tradition against economic progress, the wealth of the nation against the wellbeing of particular regions or groups, and the importance of nationality against the value of global and cosmopolitan identities, for instance?

Debates about economic globalisation need to move past either/or battles about which narrative is right. The ability to integrate insights from different narratives and a willingness to explore synergies and navigate tradeoffs will become hallmarks of successful policymaking. Efficient supply chains are no longer good enough; we need them to be secure and resilient as well. Climate policy must not only be economically and technologically feasible; it must also be equitable and inclusive. The choice is not US-China cooperation, competition or confrontation, but how to navigate all three in different domains and at different times.

Looking at an issue through many narrative lenses requires a lot from us, both cognitively and normatively. But it is also the best chance we have of devising approaches that respond to the kaleidoscopic complexity of today's challenges.

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There are six main narratives of globalisation, all flawed | Aeon Essays

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Isaiah Berlin understood the parable of the fox and the hedgehog - 'the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing' - to illustrate two styles of thinking. Hedgehogs relate everything to a single vision, a universally applicable organising principle for understanding the world.

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An Aeon article looking in detail about the way in which urban ethnographers can sometimes undermine the ethnic inequalities which they seek to improve. 

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An Aeon article looking in detail about the way in which urban ethnographers can sometimes undermine the ethnic inequalities which they seek to improve. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE There are many things that students could focus on here, amongst them: what methodology separates the humanities from the social sciences? In what way is the academic system - to which the urban ethnographers belong - complicit in the inequality? How do assumptions lead us astray?

Key terms Foundational tenets, Empirical findings, Poverty porn, White-saviour mentality, Emotional and the visceral

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With Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests spreading across the globe this year, this ought to be a moment when sociologists cast valuable light on how racist thinking affects everyday life. Sociology is, after all, deeply invested in its Others; racial others, gendered others, economic others, indeed every other other, is at the focal point of the discipline, even if too narrow a lens is applied when studying some of these social others. Sociology should matter now more than ever. Yet it disappoints, because it doesn't know its others very well.

I should know, because I am Black, and I'm a sociologist who has had (mostly white) professors and colleagues attempt to teach me about being Black since I was first an undergraduate. It's an odd position to be in: to find myself the object that my peers make a living off examining.

As a Black student at a predominately white university, sociology provided a welcome home for me, and other students of colour, most of us fledgling activists eager to develop a framework to better understand and describe our alienated experiences. Early on, and in keeping with just about every introductory sociology course across North America, I was assigned C W Mills's text The Sociological Imagination (1959). The first chapter on the 'promise' of sociology is routinely used to introduce students to the basic principles of the field. I learned that specific individuals are located historically, and also in relation to social structures that preceded and will survive them; that particular societies tend to produce particular types of people; and that personal troubles are related to larger social problems, but since they're not identical they warrant different analytical lenses.

Sociology's foundational tenets ought to help us understand how racist thinking and practices, such as police harassment and discrimination, continue to shape nearly every facet of social life. And they are useful for thinking about the way the United States produces particular types of racists. But this usefulness has its limitations. Like other social sciences, an overemphasis on empirical findings leads to research that says more about the techniques of sociology than about society itself.

At the heart of US sociology are two interlocking fixations: method and race. Together they prop up a liberal fantasy of discovering Black pain - of somehow measuring it and then documenting it in great detail, again and again. Black identities and lived experiences are endlessly layered and diverse, but this is a problem for methodologies that require (or presume) fixed categories to produce research that is generalisable, verifiable and replicable - the hallmarks of social scientific enquiry. Regardless of whether the work is qualitative or quantitative, it's the purported empiricism of the field that separates it from the humanities and interdisciplinary studies, encouraging a flattening of Black life that overlooks its diversity and pleasures. Blackness is treated only through the lens of social problems; we are defined by where we fall on normal distributions, or bell curves, that track how much we adhere to white norms, or else remain social outliers.

Increasingly, the public face of sociology is dominated by urban ethnography. Researchers often flock to this qualitative arena to study race and racism, because it promises to reveal stories from the perspective of those being examined. Ethnography allows researchers to delve deeper and to tease out subtleties that are glossed over in official state documents and surveys. The methodology has a faithful following, especially among idealistic graduate students and professors hoping to reconnect to the social justice concerns that carried them into the field in the first place. It affords them far more intimate access to their objects of study than other researchers can hope to attain, while positioning them as deeply sympathetic and eager to learn, in fine detail, how specific individuals experience and deal with a system that is hopelessly rigged against them.

Yet even the most self-aware ethnographers can succumb to blind spots. In her ethnography On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (2014), Alice Goffman pieces together a compelling account of how easily young Black men find themselves ensnarled in the criminal justice system from a young age. They are hunted by police, like prey, and arrested, often for nonviolent offences: unpaid fines, missed court dates and other minor probation violations.

Goffman spent six years in a neighbourhood in West Philadelphia that she dubbed 'Sixth Street'. At the time, she was a sociology undergraduate, then graduate student working with some of the most prominent urban ethnographers in the field. Goffman set out to understand how poor Black neighbourhoods are overpoliced, and what effects this relentless surveillance had on the lives of a group of teenagers and young men. She spent time with them at home and on the stoop. She visited them in hospitals, in jail and at sentencing hearings. In the book, Goffman forms close friendships with the men, and appears genuinely concerned about their welfare when their families and girlfriends prove unreliable support systems in threatening to call the police to resolve disputes over child support, for example, knowing that the young men have active warrants out for their arrest. The boys and men seem to have only each other - and Goffman.

Goffman's ethnography reads like a novel. Unburdened by academese, it's fast paced and engrossing. And it's character driven, based on eyewitness accounts and day-to-day conversations and observations. The book is chock-full of dialogue from Goffman's direct conversations, ones she overheard, and ones later recounted to her about the teenagers' and young men's lives 'on the run', dodging arrest. She also describes scenes she witnessed that include police kicking down doors and violently apprehending suspects, often in front of young children who then made a game of imitating this dangerous cat-and-mouse play with each other. She showed that people regarded as thugs, criminals and other shadowy figures of the white imagination weren't just human beings, but incredibly likeable ones.

Was Goffman a reliable narrator of the Black youths' experience?

After the publication of On the Run, Goffman was celebrated for her bravery: a young white woman, she'd immersed herself in the inner city and developed meaningful relationships with Black youths who took her into their confidence and allowed her to trail them for years. That embeddedness gave Goffman ample material for painting a personal face on the structural racism and mass incarceration outlined in books such as Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). And Goffman was widely praised for her efforts, attracting glowing write-ups in The New York Times and other elite outlets. A TED Talk followed in 2015, drawing more than 2 million views.

Despite its warm reception, On the Run elicited the usual handwringing over the collection and presentation of ethnographic data. Could its findings be verified and replicated by others or used to make more general statements, given the small sample size? Some journalists went so far as to travel to what they believed was the 'real' Sixth Street, in search of proof that would back Goffman's claims. It wasn't as if Goffman could provide notes and interview transcripts; in fact, she claimed she'd burned them to protect the identities of her friends/participants and because she had witnessed illegal activity such as drug dealing.

More troubling were the ethical concerns raised by legal scholars. Steven Lubet suggested that Goffman exposed herself as an accomplice to crimes, including a conspiracy to commit murder, under Pennsylvania law. For example, she and a friend/study participant drove around with a loaded gun searching for someone believed to have killed another friend/study participant. In the end, many of the questions aimed against On the Run - was Goffman a reliable narrator of the Black youths' experience? What drew her to that topic and research site in the first place? Is it ethical that she benefits professionally and materially from work based on other peoples' lives? Did she have more access to prestigious academic and publishing circles as the child of the famous sociologist Erving Goffman? - could be asked of the discipline more generally, not to mention urban ethnography more specifically.

Black observers voiced a different set of concerns - less about the merits or generalisability of ethnography than the assumptions underlying Goffman's project and its initial reception. Christina Sharpe describes Goffman's work as 'the latest instalment in a sociological tradition that subjects Black life to scholarly scrutiny'. This is not a compliment. Sharpe is troubled by Goffman's (and, by implication, sociology's) massive blind spots around white supremacy and anti-Blackness, and by Goffman's role in the reproduction of both. Goffman, she contends, displays a disturbing unfamiliarity with literatures outside the discipline, so much so that she gets Black fugitivity all wrong. Yet, as ever, the predictable work of white sociologists is celebrated, awarded and circulated above the longstanding work of Black scholars and activists.

Six years on, we continue to see new ethnographies that recreate many of the same issues, and white urban ethnographers praised for plunging themselves into the dark, urban jungle to shine a light on inequality. Matthew Desmond's book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016) won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Now a sociology professor at Princeton University, Desmond was also awarded a MacArthur fellowship or 'genius grant' that carried a $625,000 no-strings-attached cash prize. Like Goffman, he immersed himself in his field while a graduate student living in a trailer park on the south side of Milwaukee, then in a rooming house on the north side. His book is structured around the intimate stories of eight families whom he follows from one shelter or condemned apartment to the next. He describes them moving out their possessions in large trash cans in the middle of the night to avoid embarrassment; recounts conversations between landlords and tenants about overdue rent; and describes violent scenes of eviction - police arriving as tenants, with kids in tow, have their belongings scattered on a street kerb.

These stories are heartbreaking. But we might ask ourselves why hearts need to be broken in such an invasive fashion. And we might question, too, whose lives get held up in this manner, their most difficult moments written about in detail for strangers to consume in books described as 'page-turners'. Isn't this just poverty porn?

Desmond demonstrates that eviction contributes to chronic poverty, since people with eviction violations on their records, mostly single mothers, find it far harder to secure housing, and find themselves unable to climb out from behind court fees and back-rent charges. He tells an important tale about the lack of public housing across US cities, and the landlords who profit from renting to the most economically disadvantaged. Yet his victims and villains are too easily identified, and the private devastations of the former are laid bare for curious readers. Above it all, the ethnographer gets painted as the hero.

Goffman and Desmond are both white. But, to a large extent, the issue doesn't lie with them personally - or with the host of other white researchers studying poor Black people. The problem is urban ethnography itself. Urban ethnography, along with other qualitative and quantitative social methods, represents an ethnocentric approach. As the sociologists Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggest, there's a 'white logic' to the way methods are deployed, first to help construct people of colour as walking social problems, and then to relentlessly monitor what they think we're up to at the margins of society. The historian Saidiya Hartman goes a step further in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), describing social scientists prowling through the inner city as near-vampires who 'feed on the lifeblood of the ghetto, long for it and loathe it'.

Sociologists end up weirdly reifying the status quo rather than critiquing or unpacking it. In Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2003), Roderick Ferguson traces how the founding impulses of US sociology themselves sprang from a concern with how well Black communities reflected or were incorporated into traditional social institutions that regulate and discipline human behaviour, such as work and family. From this vantage point, Black and brown people are forever playing catch-up to their white counterparts who always seem to have more of everything and live happier lives. For the rest of us, the picture is bleak. It's as if the entirety of our experience is reduced to white pathologies keeping us from the lives they think we ought to be living.

Sociologists, and ethnographers in particular, operate from a white-saviour mentality

After all, Black people do more than get arrested and evicted, even in poor neighbourhoods. Our lives are far more complex, and plenty of poor Black people don't experience the kind of frightening encounters that Desmond and Goffman recount. At this point, I'm waiting for the ethnographic studies that stalk those doing the policing and evicting, at home and at work, for years on end, lingering over their most painful experiences to raise awareness among strangers they'll never meet. The fact that these books have yet to surface is a matter of how social problems are defined and of who's asking the questions and doing the looking.

From the University of Chicago to Columbia University, sociologists make a habit of studying the neighbourhoods that surround their campus, and of encouraging their students to do the same. Other people's homes become their social laboratories. That this work is viewed as illuminating - and rewarded as pathbreaking, despite its ubiquity - says more about how and why students approach these communities than about the people who live there. It also assumes the imagined audience for their work is similar to them. The rest of us don't need a sociologist to spend years watching Black people living their lives to convince us that we are likeable and live lives that matter. It's not our heartstrings that are meant to be pulled.

We might think of urban ethnographers, and sociologists more generally, as talking to themselves in a feedback loop where they answer questions many of us aren't asking. The historian Michael Rothberg might class them as 'implicated subjects' who overlook the fact that they are socially positioned close to those in power. Implicated subjects benefit from the status quo. Recognising yourself as one is difficult and even harder to rectify, particularly when you see yourself as advocating on behalf of the victimised. It requires the sort of self-reflection that Robin DiAngelo, in White Fragility (2018), says is challenging for white people, including white antiracists, since it involves moving beyond incredulity and guilt to see the part that they play, directly or indirectly, in reproducing a racist system that ultimately benefits them.

In this respect then, sociologists, and ethnographers in particular, operate from a white-saviour mentality. Referencing the 2012 documentary Kony 2012 about Ugandan war crimes - produced by the nonprofit Invisible Children, Inc - the writer and critic Teju Cole Tweeted a series of responses about the market appeal of the white saviour. His statements included:

The white saviour supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.

The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

This world exists simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah.

The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

White saviours, then, are oblivious, perhaps wilfully, of their own implication in the very injustices they make a living out of exposing. It's not just ethnographers but the academic enterprise itself that reproduces narratives about the chronic brokenness of Blackness - which then justify the research that gets done. Thinkers such as Reni Eddo-Lodge, author of Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2017), point out that it's a feature of whiteness that white people have so much influence over how and when racism is taken up as a shared crisis or a collective problem.

Too many sociologists treat their carefully crafted representations of reality as fact, rather than fact-like. While the discipline might have developed around the idea that the social is constructed, and therefore susceptible to reconstruction or social change, it is, nonetheless, still invested in an empiricism that sits at odds with social constructivism. Ideally, empirical research should be theoretically informed, and some sociologists are solely interested in the theoretical, but there remains a deep-seated belief in the existence of objective truths about the social world that can be brought to light with social-scientific methods. Even when research is qualitative, the value of someone's work is too often judged by the richness of their data: how much time did you spend in the field? How many people did you talk to? How large is your dataset? How many pages of notes did you end up with? In sociology, size always matters.

Yet despite all of sociology's shortcomings, I still look forward to teaching ethnographies in my methods and social analysis course. I present them as case studies of what Avery Gordon calls 'haunted' texts. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997), Gordon calls on sociologists to tend to that which haunts society as much as to the discipline itself, and break from conventions that erroneously limit human behaviour to rational actions that can be readily observed and defined, or measured and explained using frameworks we're familiar with, however inadequate. She is interested in all that is systematically absent from analyses - not least the authors' own investments and anxieties - and that which is too inconvenient to be included (such as when our victims don't perform their victimhood as expected). She sees promise in dissonance, as long as it's not hidden in footnotes or appendices or lost altogether in fieldnotes long-since discarded. Ghosts then, for Gordon, are not to be denied or repressed, since they draw our attention to uncomfortable truths we must contend with if the haunting is to ever cease.

In addition to minimising the complexities of racialised experiences, sociology is ill suited to the emotional and the visceral, to the kind of passion and resonance of the BLM movement. Again, a lot gets left out of social analysis when we restrict ourselves to only those accounts that can be rationally explained and proven with primary evidence. Probing the limits of disciplinary conventions can produce multifaceted, illuminating work that might look more like art than science, but it also feels more like some kind of truth.

Sociology's race problem is bigger than the faulty lens that transforms some of us into social others

Hartman tackles just those limits in studying pasts that are not quite past, or histories that defy and escape official record - histories that feel at once distant and immediate, strange and personal. She is both drawn to and repelled by the colonial archives that originated as tools of enslavement, registering and regulating the trade of humans. In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), Hartman chronicles her search in West Africa for stories about the long-dead strangers among whom she finds herself being counted. She wrestles with the search - why she's there, what she hopes to find, what she wishes she hadn't - and with her own family history, which is largely unknown to her but which she craves to grab hold of, wanting to know, for example, who her great-great-grandmother was.

Hartman weaves autobiographical with ethnographic and historical work, combining theory with practice, but never discounting the way imaginative acts and downright fictions animate her project and her ties to it. Sharpe's book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) likewise takes up this work of being transparent about, and untangling, her personal experiences in thinking about the way Black lives and the representations of them are very much haunted by the past. Hartman and Sharpe do more than state their personal stake in their professional writing: their positionality, their subjective experience as Black women, is part of the analysis itself. It's not hidden or denied in the interests of appearing impartial. For me, this makes these scholars more reliable as narrators: they defy convention, reorient methodological lenses and disrupt the line between subjects and objects of study, as much as that between objective truths and constructed knowledge. They tend to that which haunts history as much as to what haunts them - and all of us - today: the unspeakable, the unknown, the taboo.

A few years ago, I travelled to the United Kingdom to attend a small conference at the University of York about 'representing and remembering' the transatlantic slave trade. Most people there were historians, or museum and heritage scholars from across the UK and North America. I was one of only a few sociologists and felt relatively at home in this interdisciplinary crowd, except that I was once again the only Black speaker. It was a lively event, but as I sat in the audience listening to one speaker after another dispassionately discuss historical violence and ongoing trauma, I was struck by just how personal the material was to me - as someone living a Black life in what Sharpe calls 'the wake' of the slave trade. With my own Black body on display before the audience, and in the absence of others, I talked about museum representations of African bodies as bowed and broken in enslavement. But the work of the other speakers felt personal, too. We're all living in the wake of those slave ships, after all. It's just that white academics studying Blackness are viewed as objective or impartial, whether they present their ideas with great zeal or stiff-collared coolness, while a Black person studying ... well anyone or any topic is filtered through what the audience thinks it knows about us.

Topically, sociology has a broad scope with incredibly porous and fuzzy borders. The American Sociological Association describes it as 'the study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behaviour'. It's as historical as it is contemporary, and knows no geographic limits. So, it's the study of everything, everywhere, at any time. This wide purview distinguishes it from other social sciences, while an insistence that sociology is an empirical science separates it from the humanities. You might say that sociology is hampered by a paranoid relation to both social science and the humanities, which, in turn, encourages sociologists to glorify their own methods and models - in themselves social products - as proof of the rigour of the field.

Although it's a foundational principle, sociologists forget that sociology, like all academic disciplines, is a social institution. Trained in analysis and critique, and then expected to direct their gaze on the outside world, they forget that the outside is already within us.

Like other academics working in fields created with their othering in mind, I feel no allegiance to standard operating procedures that treat people like me as perpetual shrunken objects. I don't need to think I'm some sort of scientist to think of myself as a sociologist. And I don't need to discount, or place hierarchies on, the knowledge production of academics outside my field - let alone that of activists, artists, performers, creative writers and journalists - because their techniques aren't obvious to me. In general, academics of colour and LGBTQ scholars can see quite easily that the emperor has no clothes, and we are less likely to pretend otherwise. To do so would be to perpetuate a violence onto ourselves.

In the end, sociology's race problem is bigger than the faulty lens that transforms some of us into social others, or social problems. There's a larger issue about the ongoing default status of whiteness as the standard used to define social difference and what is considered solid academic work in the first place.

BLM is an imaginative, multidimensional social movement. It disrupts and undoes tidy narratives that flatten and homogenise Black experiences. As a movement lasting more than six years now, it's as clever as it is angry, as demanding as it is celebratory, as hopeful as it is sober, and for some it feels quite dangerous. BLM represents more complex portrayals of Blackness as intersectional and diverse (embracing queer lives, immigrant lives, trans lives, disabled lives, and more) and also, crucially, as relational, including a fateful entanglement with whiteness. It's a movement pushing at the very centre that academia represents and upholds. Traditional disciplines such as sociology would do well to evolve to meet the demands of our social moment. This means grappling with the ghosts haunting academia itself, not least the disciplinary policing that protects sociology's status as a (social) science.

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Urban ethnographers do harm in speaking for Black communities | Aeon Essays

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With Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests spreading across the globe this year, this ought to be a moment when sociologists cast valuable light on how racist thinking affects everyday life.

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A Big Think article, exploring how cell phone data is being used to redesign cities. 

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A Big Think article, exploring how cell phone data is being used to redesign cities. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How is it being drawn on to help redesign cities? Why is this necessary? Does this support the idea that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’? This is a purely quantitative approach to design - do we need to balance it with qualitative research?

KEY TERMS Big data, City science, General conclusions

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Almost 55 percent of the world's seven billion people live in cities. And unless the COVID-19 pandemic puts a serious - and I do mean serious - dent in long-term trends, the urban fraction will climb almost to 70 percent by midcentury. Given that our project of civilization is staring down a climate crisis, the massive population shift to urban areas is something that could really use some " sciencing."

Is urbanization going to make things worse? Will it make things better? Will it lead to more human thriving or more grinding poverty and inequality? These questions need answers, and a science of cities, if there was such a thing, could provide answers.

Good news. There already is one!

The science of cities

With the rise of Big Data (for better or worse), scientists from a range of disciplines are getting an unprecedented view into the beating heart of cities and their dynamics. Of course, really smart people have been studying cities scientifically for a long time. But Big Data methods have accelerated what's possible to warp speed. As "exhibit A" for the rise of a new era of city science, let me introduce you to the field of "human mobility" and a new study just published by a team I was on.
Credit: nonnie192 / 405009778 via Adobe Stock
Human mobility is a field that's been amped up by all those location-enabled devices we carry around and the large-scale datasets of our activities, such as credit card purchases, taxi rides, and mobile phone usage. These days, all of us are leaving digital breadcrumbs of our everyday activities, particularly our movements around towns and cities. Using anonymized versions of these datasets (no names please), scientists can look for patterns in how large collections of people engage in daily travel and how these movements correlate with key social factors like income, health, and education.

There have been many studies like this in the recent past. For example, researchers looking at mobility patterns in Louisville, Kentucky found that low-income residents tended to travel further on average than affluent ones. Another study found that mobility patterns across different socioeconomic classes exhibit very similar characteristics in Boston and Singapore. And an analysis of mobility in Bogota, Colombia found that the most mobile population was neither the poorest nor the wealthiest citizens but the upper-middle class.

These were all excellent studies, but it was hard to make general conclusions from them. They seemed to point in different directions. The team I was part of wanted to get a broader, comparative view of human mobility and income. Through a partnership with Google, we were able to compare data from two countries - Brazil and the United States - of relatively equal populations but at different points on the "development spectrum." By comparing mobility patterns both within and between the two countries, we hoped to gain a better understanding of how people at different income levels moved around each day.

Mobility in Brazil vs. United States
Credit: Hugo Barbosa et al., Scientific Reports, 2021.
The results were remarkable. In a figure from our paper (shown above), it's clear that we found two distinct kinds of relationship between income and mobility in cities.

The first was a relatively sharp distinction between where people in lower and higher income brackets traveled each day. For example, in my hometown of Rochester, New York or Detroit, the places visited by the two income groups (e.g., job sites, shopping centers, doctors' offices) were relatively partitioned. In other words, people from low-income and high-income neighborhoods were not mixing very much, meaning they weren't spending time in the same geographical locations. In addition, lower income groups traveled to the city center more often, while upper income groups traveled around the outer suburbs.

The second kind of relationship was exemplified by cities like Boston and Atlanta, which didn't show this kind of partitioning. There was a much higher degree of mixing in terms of travel each day, indicating that income was less of a factor for determining where people lived or traveled.

In Brazil, however, all the cities showed the kind of income-based segregation seen in U.S. cities like Rochester and Detroit. There was a clear separation of regions visited with practically no overlap. And unlike the U.S., visits by the wealthy were strongly concentrated in the city centers, while the poor largely traversed the periphery.

Data-driven urban design

Our results have straightforward implications for city design. As we wrote in the paper, "To the extent that it is undesirable to have cities with residents whose ability to navigate and access resources is dependent on their socioeconomic status, public policy measures to mitigate this phenomenon are the need of the hour." That means we need better housing and public transportation policies.

But while our study shows there are clear links between income disparity and mobility patterns, it also shows something else important. As an astrophysicist who spent decades applying quantitative methods to stars and planets, I am amazed at how deep we can now dive into understanding cities using similar methods. We have truly entered a new era in the study of cities and all human systems. Hopefully, we'll use this new power for good.

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How cell phone data can help redesign cities

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Almost 55 percent of the world's seven billion people live in cities. And unless the COVID-19 pandemic puts a serious - and I do mean serious - dent in long-term trends, the urban fraction will climb almost to 70 percent by midcentury.