Tag Me Not or the Culture of Labelling (updated)

 "Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

Genesis 11: 7

Ironically, even when they speak one language, they still need to use it to divide themselves. Labelling is indeed a very interesting phenomenon in Western culture. I came here as a person, a soul, and then one day I realised that had I been born and lived here all my life, I would have gained a good amount of labels - vulnerable child, trauma survivor, BAME, precarious worker, most recently I realised I am also a third space professional. All these of course are ways in which others in this society might want to view me - this is not the way I identify myself. It just shows their level of thinking, prejudice, fears and narrow-mindedness. That is not to say they do not try to make amends. Sometimes the labelled get advocates to fight for their rights through organised campaigns or annual events even. Other times the labelled ones themselves come up with new labels to wash the smear from the previous one. All in the name of political correctness - another curious phenomenon in the Western world, well, the UK as far as I am aware.

Circles within circles or UK Academy Labelling

In my professional life I operate in spaces or their outskirts (depending on who you ask) which seem to be overlapping and/or sitting within each other. For example third space professionals encomapsses a wide variety of job titles such as learning developers, learning technologists, academic support services (which is a universe in itself), etc. Some of these have indeed built strong communities of practice like the EAP, the LD and the ALT communities with their own associations, academic journals and conferences. What is interesting for me here is that all of these communities or groups seem to be competing instead of collaborating considering they are working for the same goal, presumably, helping the student. That seems even weirder to me in the face of rapdily advancing genAI, whose conception and presence run contrary to what education is about in my very own and humble opinon. Even weirder, with the recent news of UK unis (and not only) closing whole departments (sentence sounds unfinished I know but, hey, I am also a NNES). Labelling here is a way to distinguish one community/ group from another and help members build a professional identity and perhaps a feeling of belonging along with all the benefits coming from it like recongition, career advancement and everything that is valued in the academy. Labelling might not be helpful, however, in the present dynamic context of "shifting professional identities and blurring of boundaries" (Whitchurch, 2008), hence the term third space was introduced in this paper.

There is a glimmer of hope on the academic horizon, though, as I am beginning to notice joint efforts on the part of academics from various quarters under the more natural umbrella term HE professonals or educators. A good example of this is the Manifesto for Teaching and Learning in a time of Gen AI -  https://openpraxis.org/articles/10.55982/openpraxis.16.4.777

The protected ones

The law posits certain characteristics are protected and it is illegal to discriminate against them. While I agree this is a noble endeavour, it goes to ridiculous proportions like having one's sexual preferences protected. Why would that be? If you need to protect someone for that, it means they are threatended and ostracised. If so, there must be a good reason they are not liked, like the mainstream society is trying the discard something which is deemed unnatural? But that is a topic for another blog perhaps. Further, sex is a bodily need one might say (for most people anyway) just like eating is. Why not have dietary preferences as protected characteristics, then? Vegans need more choices and reasonable prices where they go and perhaps less eyerolling. As a vegan I feel very strongly about this topic, but again, maybe best to discuss it another time.

The various groups of protected individuals further protect themsleves via movements and campaigns to guard their rights - these are all sorts of social movements you can think of - feminism, LGBTQI and other letters of the alphabet I have absolutely no idea of the meaning of, trans rights, neurodivergence, etc. The purpose of these movements might be to advocate for said groups on the surface but the way they act seems to me to create additional divide and disdain in society, but let's go back to the labels. In the case of protected charactersitics, labels come to indicate that we have to be careful how we treat and speak to these people, otherwise we might get into trouble. Putting labels aside (there seems to be lots of label throwing here), I think every normal person of average intelligence would give their seat to a visibly pregnant woman or not sit in the elderly seats on the bus. That makes you think why would they need to introduce a law for people to perform these commonsense acts of kindness and good manners?

Labels here serve not only to indicate protected status to outsiders of the group but they also seem to trigger reactions on the part of the members of the groups. One example I am aware of and have seen on social media is in terms of autism as a condition. People with the condition have a preference of how they want to be called by "the others" (can you see the divide here?). The emergence of the term neurodivergent also comes as a response of insiders of the group to the way those ouside call them - I attended an event on that organised by a neurodivergent academic, where the history of the term was explained and a number of useful resources shared only to show me the ridiculousness of this. You can read my grappling with this condundrum in a short thread I did here:

https://x.com/mirena07/status/1749055505857757540

I hope the above discussion has managed to show my view of labels as artifically created societal and professional means of gaining benefits and status, which nevertheless have downsides like causing further division and emotional turmoil in some cases. In any case, an interesting phenomenon showing yet again the eternal strife after dividing and belonging.

Reference:

Whitchurch, C. (2008), Shifting Identities and Blurring Boundaries: the Emergence of Third Space Professionals in UK Higher Education. Higher Education Quarterly, 62: 377-396. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x