Identity politics

Communities that form around grievance and violence are a recipe for further trouble.

- Marc Wilson

Keynote speakers - the famous folk who get invited to be the stars of the show - can make or break an academic conference.

My favourite keynote speech, ever, was by Stephen Reicher, a professor at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Reicher stands up and says, “There are high-tech talks, and there are low-tech talks. This is a no-tech talk." Without notes, or an “um” to be heard, he wandered through the audience and gave one of the best and most intimidating talks I have ever heard.

A defining experience in Reicher’s life, laying the foundation for much of his subsequent work, was English of the early 1980s. One of the most important was the St Pauls riot, just down the road from where he was an undergraduate student at the University of Bristol. In an amazing opportunity to take research out of the lab and into the streets, Reicher headed down the road and interviewed people who were involved in, caught up in, or witnessed the brouhaha.

If we think of people as unreasonable, then we're much less likely to try to reason with them.