The online meeting last month brought together about forty people from health and social care, community organisations, funeral services and voluntary groups. The question that oriented the lunchtime session was how can we become better at talking about death, dying, grief and care? If we can speak about death and dying more freely, knowledgeably and confidently, we are likely to be able to care for someone more compassionately at the end of their life as well as more easily come to terms with our own mortality and live more fully.
I gave a short presentation to introduce myself and some of the key ideas I am working with. The starting point was the idea that dying is not only a medical event. It is a lived social experience with a physical dimension – most end of life care takes place outside hospitals and clinical settings, among family, friends, neighbours and communities. This shift in perspective (well documented in the literature) raises important questions about how people support one another through dying, death and bereavement, and how communities can become more capable and confident in doing so. I tried to frame the discussion around three ideas:
The first was the concept of the death system: the network of people, places, organisations, practices and symbols involved in preventing death, caring for the dying, disposing of the dead, supporting bereavement and creating meaning around loss. Once we begin looking for it, the death system becomes visible throughout everyday life.
The second was death literacy. Death literacy is the knowledge and skills needed to understand death and dying, care for others at the end of life, navigate support services, and have conversations that many people still find difficult. Rather than viewing death literacy simply as something to be measured, I suggested it can be approached as a curriculum for public learning and community education. You can easily evaluate your own death literacy.
The third idea was compassionate communities. Developed over the last twenty-five years as public health palliative care, compassionate communities recognise that end of life care is not solely the responsibility of professional services. Communities (you and me) have an important role in supporting people who are dying, living with loss, or caring for others. Increasingly, these ideas are reflected in policy and strategy, even where the language of compassionate communities is not explicitly used.
Last year, I undertook the initial training to be an end-of life doula (‘death doula’) and am now volunteering through the national membership organisation, End of Life Doulas UK. I invited Penny Merrett, a much more experienced end of life doula from Sheffield to speak at the meeting about doulas and death cafes. Penny described the role of doulas as providing non-medical support to people approaching the end of life and to those around them. This support may be practical, emotional, psychological or advocacy-based. It can involve helping people navigate services, discuss difficult issues with family members, plan future care, or simply make space for conversations that might otherwise never happen.
One of Penny’s remarks resonated strongly with the theme of compassionate communities. End of life doulas, she suggested, ultimately aim to make themselves redundant: the ideal is not to create dependence on a new profession (its status as a ‘professional’ role is often questioned), but to help build communities where people feel more confident supporting one another through death and dying.
Penny also spoke about her experience of running Death Cafes in Sheffield. Death Cafes are informal, non-profit gatherings where people come together to discuss death over tea, coffee and cake. They are not counselling sessions, bereavement groups or educational workshops. There is usually no agenda. Instead, they provide a structured but open space for conversation, reflection and curiosity. The aim is straightforward: to increase awareness of death and help enrich our finite lives.
At the second meeting, I shared some of the findings from our recent report. One of its central messages is that Lincolnshire already has many of the ingredients needed to support a more compassionate, public health approach to death, dying and bereavement. Community groups, health and care professionals, charities, faith organisations and volunteers are already undertaking related work. The challenge is less about inventing new services and more about connecting and strengthening what already exists.
A recurring theme throughout the discussion was the importance of language, not least being able to have a conversation around death and dying in the first place. Health care professionals are not necessarily trained or used to talking about death either. Participants reflected on how terms such as ‘advance care planning‘ can sometimes sound clinical or bureaucratic. In practice, many of these conversations are simply to help us think about what matters to us, how we would like to live in anticipation of death, and how we would like to be cared for as we approach the end of life. We also recognised that language which works for one community may not work for another, especially where cultural differences, faith traditions or language barriers are involved.
Another discussion focused on community development (see this for a critical perspective on ABCD). Rather than beginning with a list of predetermined projects, we explored the value of starting with an asset-based approach: identifying the knowledge, relationships, experiences and resources that communities already possess. Doulas, death Cafes, festivals and other civic and cultural activities may emerge from this process, but the emphasis should be on enabling communities to decide what is meaningful and useful locally. As I suggested during the session, the principle should be “methods first, projects second.” The asset-based community development (ABCD) approach that is often advocated in the compassionate communities literature is methodologically similar to asset-based pedagogies, which I’ve worked with in one form or another for many years.
We also discussed end of life doulas again and the challenge of building capacity in Lincolnshire. Over 1500 people have been trained by Living Well Dying Well, but End of Life Doula UK have recently stated there is a shortage of trained doulas across the Midlands, with very few currently practising in Lincolnshire. I have been approached about referrals that are too far from where I live to be able to help. We questioned the potential for local training opportunities and reflected on the value of doula approaches in helping people navigate death and dying with practical, emotional and relational support. A lot of work was done in 2023 by a local palliative and end of life care co-production group, who, among other things, identified the need for trained death doulas in Lincolnshire. Unfortunately, this was deemed too expensive by the ICB.
I also drew attention to a new report from the National End of Life Care Coalition, which argues that end of life care extends beyond palliative care. Clinical expertise remains essential, but the report emphasises the equally important role played by families, neighbours, friends and communities. Its recommendations include increasing death literacy through public education and strengthening partnerships between communities and professional services.
The meeting concluded by identifying several practical next steps. These include sharing the ideas of death literacy and compassionate communities through existing health and wellbeing events, exploring interest in a Death Cafe in Lincoln, learning from emerging discussions in Boston led by the Butterfly Hospice, and investigating opportunities again for local end of life doula training.
I’m always a bit cautious when having these discussions because I am still an outsider, entering a space that some people have been working in for years and I don’t want to appear critical of their efforts. I hope it’s clear from our report that there is already considerable activity taking place across Lincolnshire that aligns with or could support a compassionate communities/public health palliative care approach. The challenge is that much of it remains fragmented and can be subsumed in the language of health and wellbeing, when we need to be talking about death and dying. The immediate action seems to be to connect people, make existing ‘assets’ more visible, and create a shared language for work that is already happening. If compassionate communities begin anywhere, they begin with conversations that help people recognise they are not starting from nothing.
I wasn’t aware until today that in the heat of the student occupations and oppressive responses from management and the police at Columbia University in 2024, students and staff were thinking about how to create a co-operative university. They were trying to ‘reimagine the university as a multi-stakeholder cooperative of faculty, students, staff, and community’, along the lines of what we had also tried to work through. The video below is well worth watching – very familiar at times – and Kali Akuno really speaks from experience to the crisis Columbia students and staff find themselves in. I hope it didn’t stop there.
I want to pass this on: A thoughtful, semi-fictional, epistolary film that discusses the practical meaning of André Gorz’s ideas, which were influenced by Marx, Sartre, Illich and others. More info here>
I received this newsletter update yesterday from the Co-operative College:
“As you may be aware, the College has operated for several years without core or government funding. Despite everyone’s best efforts over the last 10 years to implement cost saving measures and diversify income generating work streams, the College has been unable to reach financial sustainability. Therefore, the Board have taken the decision to cease all learning delivery as of 1 August 2026, and transition to an unstaffed operating model which will allow us to optimise our remaining funds to continue to meet our charitable objects.”
Although I was aware there were financial problems at the College, the announcement that all staff will be made redundant by 31st July and that the continuation of the ‘Co-operative College’ name is uncertain, came as a surprise to me. I’ve not been involved in the College’s work since the centenary book chapter was published. It was a way of consolidating my involvement and moving on, while Mike Neary continued to work with them until he became ill. That was shortly after the College submitted an application to the OFS for degree-awarding powers in 2019.
The detail in the OFS application demonstrates that it was a sincere and serious attempt to re-orient and restructure the College towards a federated model of co-operative higher education. At that moment at least, the College was willing and felt able to put everything it had into the plan, but I understand that the pandemic created too much uncertainty for the College and the application was withdrawn. It would be a useful set of documents to make available for archival research and to enable open discussion about why the plans failed. What can we learn from this? In fact, the rise and fall of the Co-operative College is a PhD waiting to happen.
The new model for the Co-operative College is not the model those of us envisaged a decade ago, but the decent, charitable intentions are still there to create some kind of legacy and I hope the remaining staff at the College are able to move on to less precarious and more hopeful work. The last few years can’t have been easy for anyone.
Fundamentally, the reasons why we felt the need for co-operative higher education and the critique that a co-operative university was meant to institutionalise, have only become more evident and necessary in light of the predictable structural problems in UK higher education. The crises of capitalism continue to intensify and the scenario of ‘dissolution’ that we proposed seems to be happening without any effort, but not towards a more co-operative model of higher education or society as a whole.
On 9th November 2024, I began to clear the site for a timber-framed ‘annex’ that would replace an existing garden shed and provide an office for Sue. The project has carried me through the winter and was finished on Mother’s Day, 30th March. I spent every weekend, many early mornings and evenings and a couple of weeks’ annual leave to build it. Despite the lack of light through the winter months, which added to the urgency of each shortened day, there were also some of the most beautifully clear, crisp days that made the work effortless.
I had significant help from an old friend, Billy, without whom I may still be drawing up plans. Billy called in one day, after many years without seeing him, just as I was thinking about how to design the building and he offered to lend a hand. He put me in touch with his school friend Mark, who took my sketches and notes and created a set of technical drawings as well as a ‘cut list’ for the builder’s merchant. All of a sudden, I had a plan and the materials for the main structure, which we completed just before Christmas. Another of Billy’s friends, Jody, fibreglassed the roof in January, and Billy returned in February to help with the heavy lifting of the steel and larch cladding. My old school friend, Whitey, who I hadn’t seen for over a decade, completed the electrics in March. My friend from work, Rob, came for a day to help finish the office interior, which ended up taking us three days. It has therefore been a collaborative project but when people ask, ‘Did you build that?’ I can say I did. I have been consumed by every detail.
The annex is a 15m square, 2.5m high building, partitioned two thirds to the rear to provide a garden tool shed at the back and a comfortable office at the front. It is constructed using modern methods of timber-framing. The walls, for example, are built up of nine layers of materials: External cladding, horizontal and then vertical battens, breather membrane, ply sheathing, a timber frame filled with PIR insulation, a reflective air and vapour barrier and plywood internal walls finished with Danish oil. I enjoyed every stage of the construction except cutting the insulation and am pleased with the finished result, which should outlive me. Now, there’s a thought.
This is such an important account of the sincere, persistent but frustrated efforts to establish a co-operative form of higher education. I have added it to the bibliography, but wanted to highlight this article in particular because it captures so well, the lived experience of creating alternative institutions that, by their nature, cannot exist apart from the social context to which they are opposed.
Mike’s published work can be found via the University of Lincoln research repository. Work published prior to his time at Lincoln (pre-2007) is not complete on that list. More can be found on Google Scholar, but the list includes the work of other people by the same name. Mike also wrote on his blog between 2014 and 2017. If you have trouble locating an article or chapter, please contact me. I may have it.
Mike Neary joined the University of Lincoln from Warwick to become Dean of Teaching and Learning, and Director of the Centre for Educational Research and Development in 2007. During his 15 years at Lincoln, Mike also served as Director of the Graduate School, Professor of Sociology and Emeritus Professor of Sociology. He was a National Teaching Fellow and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and awarded honorary lifetime membership of Lincoln Students’ Union in 2014.
During his time as Dean of Teaching and Learning, he led two ambitious and openly subversive projects: Learning Landscapes, which demonstrated why academics should have a greater role in the design and governance of university estate, and Student as Producer, an institutional strategy to make research-engaged teaching the default for all teaching and learning at Lincoln. Although labelled a ‘teaching and learning’ project, the organising principle of Student as Producer, like Learning Landscapes, was the democratisation of higher education, aligning students and academics towards the shared production of knowledge.
Both projects were deemed successful at Lincoln and have been influential across the UK and internationally. However, Mike understood and accepted that Student as Producer would be reinterpreted and recuperated as various forms of ‘student engagement’. His critical response to this was to establish, with others, the Social Science Centre, Lincoln, an independent co-operative for higher education that was democratically owned and run by its members. It was through the Social Science Centre, that its members developed further the theory and practice of Student as Producer. With Mike, they drew on the radical history of the worker co-operative movement, asserting that the means of knowledge production (i.e., the university) should be democratically owned and controlled by its scholars, both teachers and students. This work inspired the Co-operative College, Manchester, and other educational co-operatives around the UK, to pursue the creation of a federated co-operative university. At the time of his retirement, Mike became Chair of the Co-operative University’s interim Academic Board at the Co-operative College. A formal submission for a federated co-operative university was made to the Office for Students, but plans were thwarted by the pandemic. Throughout this whole period, Mike tried to encourage everyone – students, activists, local citizens – to find their voices in the various spaces and projects because, despite his professorial stature, he knew that we all have a lot to learn from each other.
Mike published extensively on higher education policy, critical pedagogy and academic labour. His written work is characterised by both serious social critique and daring intellectual creativity, evident in his last book, Student as Producer: How Do Revolutionary Teachers Teach? The book consolidated over a decade of intensive theorising and extensive practice aimed at defending and revitalising the role of the university as a community of teachers and students drawn together around the production of knowledge for humanity. Connections can be found in this work with earlier co-authored books, on labour theory and the critique of money. He also undertook research on the labour movement in Korea, and the prospects of regeneration in coalfield communities. His PhD was a critical history of youth training – he was a youth worker before entering academia.
Mike’s intellectual influences were diverse: he greatly admired the Canadian scholar, Moishe Postone’s interpretation of Marx and saw himself working in the tradition of critical political economy and ‘value-form theory’. His PhD supervisor at Warwick, Simon Clarke, always remained a model of intellectual rigour and clarity. Alongside these eminent Marxist scholars, Mike drew inspiration from avant-garde art; examples such as Brecht, Burgess, Epstein, Klee, Dada and Vorticism are woven into his writing. In one article, he brought together the work of Karl Marx and the Medieval Bishop of Lincoln Cathedral, Robert Grossteste, in another he united Marx’s theory of value with Einstein’s special theory of relativity. He was always restlessly trying to bring the natural and social sciences together into ‘one science’.
Mike was a much-loved and greatly respected colleague, known for his warm, welcoming approach and great sense of humour. He is remembered as being inspirational to many, colleagues and students alike. He made a profound and lasting contribution to the University of Lincoln, and other institutions in the UK and internationally, as a committed revolutionary, a genuinely bold and innovative thinker, intent on reinventing the core purpose of higher education.
Kate Strudwick, Dean of Teaching and Learning and Joss Winn, Senior Lecturer, University of Lincoln.
~~~
Eulogy for Mike, 14th February 2023 – Joss Winn
Mike was my friend, colleague, PhD supervisor, and co-author of ten articles and book chapters. Because we worked closely together for over a decade, I thought I would say something about Mike’s creativity; about Mike as an artist and how the influence of other artists can be found in his writing. Mike’s understanding of humanity was that we all have a natural capacity for creativity which has been suppressed. I believe that learning from and teaching Mike’s work can help us recover that creativity.
Many of you know Mike as a social theorist. Working with Mike, it became clear to me that creating theory is a type of artistic practice: exploratory, expressive, speculative, risky, and challenging, but ultimately productive because creating social theory changes the way we see the world, just like other forms of art, such as painting, theatre, sculpture or architecture.
Throughout the time I’ve known Mike, he would draw on the work of other artists to help develop what he was trying to say: for example, the writing of Bertolt Brecht and Anthony Burgess; Jacob Epstein’s sculpture, Rock Drill; Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, and the avant-garde art movements of Dada and Vorticism. You will find in Mike’s writing, a highly original attempt to bring together the work of Karl Marx and the Medieval Bishop of Lincoln Cathedral, Robert Grossteste. There is also a wonderful piece of writing called ‘Pedagogy in Paradise’, where he experiments with rythmnanalysis and photography during his time in Chile. A favourite example of Mike the artist is the writing he produced with Glenn Rikowski, that unites Marx’s theory of value with Einstein’s special theory of relativity. When I first read that article, it overwhelmed me, like great art does. I was in awe of what they had set out to do.
I don’t know if Glenn’s experience of writing with Mike was similar to mine, but I will finish by telling you about how Mike and I would write together. At regular intervals in the writing process, it would involve us sitting together and reading our work out loud to one another, a bit like actors reading a script around a table before they rehearse on stage. By taking it in turns to read something out loud we’d have to speak slowly for the other to take it in, knowing the tone and texture of our respective contributions had to work together, to become a unified whole – one voice, not two.
I miss those meetings but thankfully, I still hear his voice when I read the words.
~~~
We Stammer
Spoken by Mike Neary. Recorded by Nik Farrell Fox, January 2017.
~~~
A Personal Paean to Mike Neary – Nik Farrell Fox, 29th March 2023
Mike and I were thrust together by happenstance in a dialectical dance of necessity, fortune and chance. My new next-door neighbour would soon become the best friend I’ve ever had and the finest, most exemplary man I’ve ever known. Tall, handsome and graceful, his eccentricity was magnetic, his intellect was profound and his face exuded the gentleness and warmth that endeared him to so many. His lilting voice was soft and welcoming but not without authority and some piquancy when irked or when expressing outrage at the world’s immorality and grotesque injustices. The ‘pedagogy of hate’ that he espoused as a theoretical tool for destroying capitalism on the surface sat contradictorily within a man so gentle and kind. But, as with many kissed by the revolutionary spirit of freedom, Mike’s ‘hatred’ was of a pure, redemptive nature fuelled by a deep love for his fellow human beings and a great distress at their enslavement and enforced predicaments.
Although we did many things together, the details of which I’ll remember with ultimate fondness, it was our revelatory and blissful walks around the West Common that I miss most of all. We would walk around the perimeter, with each stage host to a different topic. From the gate to the northerly tip we discussed football – results, managers, players, favourite and least favourite pundits, past exploits on the pitch when we were youngsters captaining our respective school teams, funny anecdotes and leftfield observations pertaining to the most tenuous of connections. I always found Mike very humorous, interesting and playful in his observations. From here we would then traverse the next section with academia taking over, discussing where we were at with our research. Mike listened to my protracted ramblings with an encouraging, comradely ear while showing the greatest modesty in relation to his own, far more portentous deeds, which impressed me nonetheless. For the next mile or two we assailed each other with the jargon of philosophical discourse – I hit him in the jowls with Sartre, Foucault and Nietzsche while he floored me with Marx, Negri and Ranciere. Despite the intensity of our reasonings, protestations and proclamations, never for a single second did our words ever become barbed or our moods hostile. I loved arguing and finding agreement with Mike for he was an intellectual giant and a very sporting gladiator. After all, our disagreements were slight, for our minds thought similar things and our revolutionary hearts beat in tempo. For the final part of the walk, once our academic muscles had been sufficiently exercised, family became our topic of conversation in which Mike would always take a genuine interest in the minutiae of what I told him about my Loved Ones before he told me with great affection about his. Back at the Common gate, we would on occasion just want to keep talking and would repeat the circuit, trampling over the same topics and clods of earth. Otherwise, we just shuffled back together like two contented creatures along West Parade before disappearing back into adjacent houses until the delight of doing it all again in a week’s time.
Nietzsche (not him again, Mike groans), saw friendship as life’s most precious gift and as a bona fide recipe for a healthy society. There were, he said, three essential components to any great friendship – agonism (where, through sublimated competition, we each grow and develop), the sharing of joyful experiences (in which we partake of common perceptions and actions), and the virtue of bestowing (in which we pass on our knowledge and attributes as ‘gifts’ to the other). All three were ever-present in my unwavering and unbesmirched friendship with Mike, but as, Nietzsche stated, it is the bestowing virtue of friendship that carries the greatest weight. Mike’s life was a gift to us all who knew and loved him, and the knowledge, kindness and good vibrations that he bestowed will live on as vibrant memories in the hearts of many others like my own. To echo the final words of his final book, he taught us (in a soft Geordie accent) how to learn from each other and flourish together as ‘a pedagogy of excess in a world of abundance’
Adieux, my precious friend, a human being, as Nietzsche spoke prophetically of the Übermensch, ‘with Caesar’s strength and Christ’s soul’
~~~
Remembering Mike Neary: ‘Teaching as a Collaborative, Political Activity’ – Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of Journalism
Mike Neary had an enormous impact on the University of Lincoln. For Mike (inspired as he was by Marx), pedagogy was always political – and he was not afraid to put his ideas into practice. In the end, his ideas about the Student as a Producer and Learning Landscapes transformed teaching practices across the institution. But for Mike the political was also the personal and so he devoted a lot of his energy to supporting colleagues and students at an individual level.
I personally benefited from this support in many ways. One of his ambitions was to inject the research-led post-graduate culture wherever possible into the undergraduate culture. Responding to that initiative, my late friend and colleague John Tulloch, Head of Journalism, and I launched the country’s first BA in Investigative Journalism (with a prize of £200 for the best student of the year – donated by the celebrated reporter John Pilger). For this degree, the students had no formal class teaching in their final semester: instead, they were able to dedicate the whole of their time to researching and writing their individual investigative projects. They would meet as a group from time to time to discuss progress – and any particular practical or ethical issues. But essentially I met them on a personal basis as if they were post-graduate research students. I had been teaching journalism since 1984 – but the work produced by the students on this programme was amongst the best I had ever supervised. And Mike was thrilled to hear about the success of the degree.
Mike arrived from Warwick University as a recipient of a National Teaching Fellowship. When I applied in 2011, he was thus able to give me crucial advice on how to present the 5,000-word submission document. When he saw my original draft he said simply: ‘Fine – but just add a bit of theory.’ Which I did – and when I won the fellowship Mike accompanied me to London for the award ceremony.
For a few years I joined Mike, Joss Winn and others in setting up the Social Science Centre in Lincoln. Mike was clearly angry at the commercialisation of higher education and the immoral, excessive fees charged students. The creation of the Social Science Centre was one of his responses. And its aims sum up Mike’s principles perfectly: ‘SSC believes that higher learning oriented towards intellectual values of critical thinking, experimentation, sharing, peer review, co-operation, collaboration, openness, debate and constructive disagreement point towards a better future for us all. The centre works to create alternative spaces of higher education whose purpose, societal value and existence do not depend on the decisions of the powerful.’
A number of speakers at the moving ‘Stammering as Dada’ commemorative event mentioned Mike’s passion for football. I (a Notts and Forest supporter being a Nottingham lad) also liked to indulge in footie gossip with him (and after I retired in 2013 we would meet up from time to time). One thing I particularly remember him saying was: ‘Actually when I go to a game I’m more interested in watching the ways in which the managers react than the actual football.’
Mike, always acutely aware that teaching is at its core (its heart) a collaborative, highly political activity, was an inspiration for me – and for countless others.
~~~
Tribute to Mike – Alan Gurbutt
Life feels short now that Mike has gone. He was a gentle person and kind. He showed me kindness, despite my awkwardness towards inequalities in state education. That was my problem and he couldn’t fix it. Mike probably didn’t realise that his teachings evoked answers within me on how Capitalism impacted my family life growing up in a council house in the 1970s, a rare privilege today, and the issues we faced not having enough money. I learnt about socioeconomic trauma through his teachings and this gave me some closure. I remember Mike being at meetings of the Social Science Centre. He was always welcoming with a smile. The last time I spoke with Mike was at the University of Lincoln. He wished me well with my nurse training and expressed how pleased he was that I was reading mental health. Mike also encouraged my daughter’s passion for learning. I wish he could have been here longer. I loved and admired him.
~~~
Plenary of the British Conference of Undergraduate Research and World Congress of Undergraduate Research at Warwick – Written by colleagues from the international Undergraduate Research community.
Our story of Mike Neary starts somewhere back in the early years of this Millennium when Mike was a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Warwick. Mike brought together a team of colleagues from many disciplines and many places to create the Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research, one of around 80 centres of excellence in teaching and learning funded at that time. Parts of the story that unfolds here are recorded more formally in the University of Warwick’s recent submission to the Teaching Excellence Framework.
Like many of us, Mike was sold on the benefits to our students’ education of undergraduate research and he was always enthusiastic about it. But Mike had the vision to see that promoting undergraduate research could have, and indeed has had, a transformative effect on universities and on us. Mike could always think beyond. He instilled his passion for Undergraduate Research in all of us and that’s embodied in everything we do. He always asked what students might have to offer and what their role might be.
In 2007 the Reinvention Centre hosted a conference called ‘The Student as Producer’, one of the first times this concept was presented in public. As well as the extensive academic debate, we discussed how to actually get on and change things in our universities. Mike had some spare funding and needed to spend it quickly. He bought a minibus! This was a typically surprising but brilliant move. The minibus had Reinvention blazoned down its sides and was a symbol of how we could connect our students to the worlds beyond the university campus.
The minibus took conference delegates to the innovative Reinvention Centre at Westwood, the first time most of us had seen beanbags in a university classroom! Mike understood the need to reinvent the spaces we study in to literally transform the landscape of higher education. The Oculus here at Warwick is a physical embodiment of Mike’s legacy, with many design features from the experimental classroom, which has now sadly gone. Around the country we see new university buildings that are directly inspired by Mike’s ideas – typically having lots of amazing classrooms for students and a few rather miserable offices for academics!
Also in 2007, Mike moved from Warwick to the University of Lincoln where he took up a senior leadership role. One of his major achievements was to persuade the University of Lincoln to make ‘Student as Producer’ its signature pedagogy, and it featured in its strategies, website, and student prospectuses. Getting buy-in from the Vice-Chancellor and the senior management team to a concept that Mike openly said had its roots in Marxist philosophy, is nothing short of amazing.
At Lincoln Mike engaged with colleagues and of course with students in his characteristic way. Mike brought people on and he helped them learn the craft of navigating higher education. Despite being a senior leader, or he would have said because he was a senior leader, Mike often immersed himself in student life, being seen quietly sitting in the corner at a student Marxist society event or on the back seat of a minibus heading to London with students protesting tuition fee increases. Mike was the ultimate critic of university bureaucracy but could use it well to achieve his goals. Always principled, Mike never lost sight of what he was trying to achieve. In retirement, Mike planned to develop his ideas around cooperative universities, work that others will now have to finish.
Mike was an insider outsider. He had what Jonathan Rée calls the courage of his anachronisms. He railed against the technocratic university and invited us to continually challenge the dominant discourse. He encouraged students to move beyond capitalist realism and to understand that they can change things. We really need Mike’s voices to continue being heard. Mike was not ideological. He saw universities as part of the destructive neoliberal project and drew on Paolo Freire’s call to constantly seek change and to reinvent. Mike embodied critical hope. He could see darkness in the world and that, while there is not necessarily light at the end of the tunnel, if we restlessly reinvent we can dare to hope.
Mike was very political and knew that education is a deeply political project building us as individuals and collectives to make the world a better place – he had democratising zeal. He saw possibilities even in elite institutions for education and research to mutually reinforce each other in transformative ways. He was brave and urged us not to be scared to talk about values in designing our universities. He never shied away from awkward situations yet despite the challenges he saw, he was never combative. Instead he was thoughtful and kind, though always with an edge.
Beyond the UK, Mike’s ideas and scholarly writing were seminal in establishing the underlying framework and ethos of the Australasian Council for Undergraduate Research, which is, to this day, a vibrant community of academics and students working together to promote and advance undergraduate research in Australasia. Mike remained a member of the ACUR Steering Committee until his untimely death.
Mike believed in the potential of others and provided them with opportunities and encouragement. He was generous, humane, principled, restlessly creative and fearless in pushing against the boundaries in education. He gave so many of us fantastic starts or changes of direction in our careers at Lincoln and at Warwick. Mike would do anything for you and he changed our lives. His impact is immeasurable. He truly was an inspirational figure and the kindest of friends.
Mike loved the British Conference of Undergraduate Research. He would have been so proud to see the hundreds of students from around the world presenting their work here at Warwick. Mike Neary should be here today.
~~~
Tributes by Richard Hall and Ana Dinerstein in Network, the magazine of the British Sociological Association.
My latest guitar follows a similar lightweight design to the previous four, only this time I chose to use different tonewoods and opted for a slotted headstock. The soundboard is Western Red Cedar; back and sides of Cedar of Lebanon; a Bog Oak fretboard; Lime neck; and Walnut bridge, binding and head veneer.
Click an image to enlarge
The following recordings are unrehearsed pieces taken with my phone, played by Rob Johns. The strings are D’Addario EJ45 normal tension.
I especially enjoyed working with Cedar of Lebanon, Walnut and Lime. The Cedar of Lebanon is very similar to Cypress, the traditional wood for flamenco guitars. The density of my set is 503 kg/m3 and I thinned the back and sides to about 2mm. It bends well and has an amazing fragrance – not the same as Cypress but just as appealing and the colour is a close match, too.
Lime is a traditional wood for carving and was a delight to work with a chisel. It also polishes up well with an interesting, tight grain across the radius of the neck. This piece of Lime is a little more dense (604 kg/m3) than Spanish Cedar, the traditional neck wood for flamenco guitars, but not far off. I routed out the centre and replaced it with a hollow carbon tube for added stiffness and lower weight.
I have worked with Walnut on previous instruments. It makes a very light bridge (13g with bone decoration) and has a nice grain pattern but its relatively low density (630 kg/m3) means that it will suffer from string wear more quickly than traditional Rosewood. To prevent this, I inserted 2mm brass tubing into the string holes.
It was the first time I have used Western Red Cedar (WRC) for the soundboard and in many respects it’s a lovely wood for this purpose. It is a very low density wood (347kg/m3) and therefore enables the lightest, most responsive soundboards. It is similar density to the Engelmann Spruce top I used on guitar #2 (385kg/m3) and I will happily use both again in the future. I think the Cedar soundboard gives the instrument a warmer sound than my previous guitars and that it suits classical and jazz more than traditional flamenco, which I have focused on previously.
The Bog Oak fretboard (909 kg/m3) was a nice idea and looks great, but I doubt I’ll use it again. It has quite an open grain and tore easily when planing it. Still, it’s nice to think that you’re working with a piece of wood that is more than 5000 years old.
The overall weight of the instrument is 1288g. Were it not for the metal machine heads, it would weight about 100g less. Once I fitted the tuners, the balance of the guitar shifted noticeably towards the head.
As you can see below, the air resonance of #6 is very similar to #3, as is the weight, once the different tuners are taken into account. However, they do not sound the same, with #3 having a little more volume and a drier, more cutting sound – just what you want from a flamenco blanca. This instrument (#6) sounds different – more versatile – with rounded notes that are even across the fretboard. The different soundboard and neck materials no doubt contribute to this and it is set up with slightly higher action.
#6: 90Hz (F# -47 cents); 1288g
#5: 82.8Hz (E +8 cents); 1319g
#4: 88.8Hz (F +29 cents); 1247g
#3: 90.8Hz (F# -32 cents); 1189g
#2: 92.9Hz (F# +7 cents); 1122g
#6 top tap tone average
No instrument, whether it is a factory-made model or an individually built hand-made guitar, will sound exactly like another; there are too many variables, not least the individual pieces of wood that are selected which vary within species and from tree to tree.
One way of trying to ensure some consistency is to measure the density and resonant modes of the wood prior to building, following the calculations given by Trevor Gore in his book, Contemporary Acoustic Guitar Design and Build (Vol. 1, section 4.5)1. With these measurements, over time I should be able to establish the physical characteristics of each piece of wood, even within a single species, and then determine the thickness of the top and back plates according to the target frequencies I am aiming for. It will take a number of instruments before I can really start to make meaningful adjustments based on what I’m looking for and should also help me develop my ear, too, by having objective data to refer to when tapping the guitar during the build process and listening to the instruments being played. Neither the traditional intuitive approach (working knowledge), where the luthier taps, listens, holds and flexes, nor the scientific approach (explicit knowledge), which Trevor Gore has explained in his recent book, is exclusive from one-another, and in fact are complementary ways of understanding the relationship between the maker and the materials.
“This article explores the first decade of classical guitar-making in Britain (1948 – 1957) and discusses the efforts of amateurs and autodidacts in the recovery, codification and instruction of craft knowledge and skills. The research for this article draws on two sources of primary data: guitar magazines and the first three attempts in the English language to codify the practical knowledge of classical guitar-making into instructional texts. I begin by identifying the instrument in its historical context. Next, I present biographical summaries of key advocates and outline the work of the first luthiers. I then discuss the Do-It-Yourself texts and argue that classical guitar-making at that time gradually gained cultural legitimacy through the efforts of autodidacts who established the requisite knowledge and skills that were later adopted and validated by educational institutions.”
Albert Percy Sharpe (1906-1968). Director of Clifford Essex Co., editor of BMG magazine and author of Make Your Own Spanish Guitar (1957), in which he documented the work of his employee, the luthier, Marco Roccia.
Wilfrid M. Appleby (1892-1987) was a controversial campaigner for the “real guitar”; founder of the International Classic Guitar Association and editor of its ‘official organ’, Guitar News. He helped stimulate classical guitar-making in Britain through his writing and support of amateur makers of “the legitimate instrument.”
This is Kay Appleby, wife of Wilfrid, and Treasurer and Business Editor of the International Classic Guitar Association. The history of classical guitar making in Britain was, and still is, an overwhelmingly male occupation but in the 100th issue of Guitar News (1968) Wilfrid Appleby acknowledged that “in all matters concerning the Association, in fact, they work as a team… It is, of course, a ‘labour of love’, and involves many hours of hard concentrated work, especially for the Business Editor, who deals with the accounts, card index and the very considerable correspondence.”
Terry Usher (1909-1969) was one of the most significant contributors to the development of modern classical guitar-making in England. As well as a player, composer and teacher, he was a prolific writer in BMG from the mid-1930s and wrote technical articles about classical guitar construction in the late 1940s. He also wrote the first English-language, scholarly, organological article on the classical guitar for The Galpin Society Journal in 1956. His day job was Public Relations Officer for Manchester City Council.
J.K. Sutcliffe was a writer for Guitar News and throughout the 1950s he wrote articles on the construction of the classical guitar. Before there was any set of instructions (in English) on building a guitar, he provided technical information for “the very patient and careful amateur.”
Harald Petersen (1910-1969) moved from Denmark to England in 1950, thinking there were more opportunities for a luthier to sell classical guitars. After a slow start, he benefited from the growing success of Len Williams’ Spanish Guitar Centre in London, which he sold his guitars through from about 1955. Peterson was the first successful self-employed maker of handmade classical guitars in Britain.
Here is A.P. Sharpe (left) in the workshop with Marco Roccia (1902-1987). Roccia was one of the first luthiers in Britain to experiment with making a ‘concert’ guitar, which he developed between 1948-1951. Terry Usher reviewed Marco Roccia’s concert guitar in 1951 as “the first true concert guitar to be produced in this country.”
Hector Quine (1926-2015) is well-known for being the first professor of guitar at the Royal Academy of Music (from 1959). Quine was also one of the first serious amateur classical guitar makers. With the encouragement of Julian Bream, he made his first instrument “mostly by unorthodox methods and devices” in 1952/3. Bream used Quine’s second instrument to perform at the Wigmore Hall in September 1954. His third instrument was used by Bream to record two albums for Westminster in 1955. Quine made 18 instruments in total over a period of about 20 years. The recording of his third instrument is probably the earliest recording of a ‘concert’ guitar made by a British luthier.
Theodorus M. Hofmeester (centre) (1897-1955) was an Architect and President of the Classical Guitar Society in Chicago. He made an important contribution to the early history of classical guitar making by creating the first technical drawing of a Torres guitar (FE26) for Guitar Review magazine in 1954. The drawing provided a useful level of detail for subsequent makers to build from. Although published in the USA, Guitar Review had readers and contributors in the U.K. and the Hofmeester drawing laid the groundwork for subsequent DIY texts on classical guitar making in Britain.
He may be holding a violin but Clifford A. Hoing (1903-1989) was responsible for the first step-by-step instructions for making a classical guitar. He did so over five issues of Woodworker magazine (1955), alongside articles on making fishing floats and furniture. He became “one of the most respected” British makers of violins and violas but should also be remembered for being the first person to codify the craft of classical guitar making.
Eric V. Ridge was a committee member of the ICGA and an amateur violin maker. He used the Hofmeester plan to help him make his first guitar, which he documented in The Birth of a Guitar (1956-7), published as a series of instructions in Guitar News. Alongside Hoing’s and Sharpe’s DIY texts, Ridge contributed a more personal narrative of discovery.
