Ceremony 4
Academic Oration
Wednesday 21 November 2013 at 1630hrs
JESUITS’ CHURCH – VALLETTA
Professor Marilyn Clark
B.A.(Hons.), M.A.(Liverpool), Ph.D.(Sheffield)
Faculty for Social Wellbeing
Working towards social justice: revisiting our ethical mandate.
Good evening and congratulations to the graduates gathered here today. Well done on your achievement!
While you have all travelled diverse trajectories to be celebrating your graduation today, I firmly believe that
what all of us present here have in common is that we have chosen to study and to work in careers that have the
potential to foster social change, social justice and well-being. By ‘social justice’, I understand a situation where
people feel mutual obligation to each other and a commitment towards fairness. This ensures that everybody has
an equal chance to succeed. Well-being is a state in which human needs are met, people report being happy and
are able to engage with life and with other people whilst having opportunities for advancement. All three
faculties and other entities represented here today hold high on their agenda a determination to make the world
fairer and just. However, while the practices fostered by disciplines like social work, youth studies, psychology,
criminology, public health and education hold immense possibility for liberation, emancipation and
empowerment, history teaches us how these disciplines have not always lived up to that promise and how they
can also be the source of control, oppression, domination and fear. Most psychologists, educators, youth
workers, social workers, probation officers and health workers enter their professions expecting to contribute
towards the betterment of society. And many of them do. However, these disciplines may, at times,
institutionalise a far too narrow view of our field’s ethical mandate to promote human welfare. We must
become aware how focusing on the individual, and engaging in minor cosmetic reforms to smooth out the rough
corners in society, simply does not go far enough. Rather, we need to engage with how cultural, economic and
political institutions may continue to foster inequality and oppress. We need to examine how dominant
theoretical paradigms and research activities may sustain the status quo and how these may at times fail to
address the real sources of difficulties people encounter in their lives. This reflexivity should become an
integral part of our ethical mandate as academics, practitioners and policy makers. We should also seek to
empower people to de-ideologise reality so that they uphold ideas that are in tune with their own interests.
As a social psychologist working mainly in academia and policy development for nearly two decades, I have seen
myself become increasingly disillusioned with the discipline of ‘mainstream’ psychology and the broader field of
the helping professions and the values and practices they at times, if inadvertently, promote. Practitioners,
researchers and policy makers, may end up being pawns in the service of social control, perpetuating an unequal
and unjust status quo – because whilst thinking that we are doing ‘good’, we may fail to be critical or reflexive
enough. In an attempt to come to terms with this, I have turned my gaze back on the discipline of psychology. A
critical history of psychology, perhaps not the one taught in standard undergraduate courses, shows all too clearly
how psychological knowledge and techniques are not always put in the service of justice and social wellbeing. For
example, in 1920 Europe, Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, although not a psychologist himself, pioneered the
use of psychological theories and findings into modern advertising and consumer psychology, which he referred to
as “the engineering of consent”; Bernays’ campaigns convinced women that smoking should not be an activity
solely restricted to men. The following quote taken from his seminal work Propaganda (1928:71) clearly shows
how he used psychology and other social science research in the service of public persuasion campaigns:
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the
masses according to our will without their knowing about it?
It is rarely taught in undergraduate history of psychology classes that Watson, the noted behaviourist, worked as
vice president of one of the largest US advertising agencies, pioneering celebrity brand loyalty for Camel
Cigarettes, and timed obsolescence as a method for conditioning consumers to wanting ever-newer products. In
1974, Kamin wrote a text titled The Science and Politics of IQ, where he exposed the bias of important
psychologists such as Terman, Yerkes and Goddard whose work on intelligence testing promoted the idea of
genetic inferiority of African Americans, Native Americans, Jews and women. Kamin uncovers how the
inhumane social policies they championed caused much suffering. Cyril Burt’s hereditarianism may well have
contributed to the development of a two track system of education in the UK in which the working class were
condemned to second class careers. Debate continues about whether Burt falsified his data. In the field of youth
studies we see how the classic work of the psychoanalytic writer Stanley Hall in 1904, continues to contribute to
the dominant representation of youth as a period of inevitable turmoil. Many academic researchers and policy
makers view young people through the ideological veil epitomized by the ‘storm and stress’ model that he
proposed and continue to view youth as suspect. In criminology, Anthony Platt’s book ‘The Child Savers’
presents a scathing critique of the social reformers who worked to create the juvenile court arguing that their main
motive was self-preservation and an attempt to control the ‘dangerous classes’ rather than humanitarian reform.
Institutionalised ideas are hard to die. While homosexuality is no longer considered a disorder, reparative therapy
continues to be practised by some. More recently, the rise of standardised testing and reliance on diagnostic
categories, ensures that scores of children who seem to be unable to cope well in the educational environments we
provide, are likely to be labelled as having some learning difficulty or other. While recognising that identifying the
difficulties children face is commendable, locating the root of the problem within the child conveniently allows us
to ignore the fact that our educational provision might be lacking. Increasing numbers of children are diagnosed
with ADHD. Sir Ken Robinson, during a lecture delivered in 2010, while not denying the existence of ADHD,
called the recent epidemic ‘as misplaced as it is fictitious’. There is an increasing tendency to medicalise
behaviour that is distressing or upsetting but that might be better placed on a continuum between normality and
maladaptive behaviour. This begs the question: who profits from a diagnosis? According to Ebberstadt, (2008)
between 3 to 5 % of American children take Ritalin, a stimulant that is intended to treat ADHD. While there is
little evidence on the long term effects of stimulants on the developing brain, children are being routinely labelled,
medicated, stigmatised. This is a classic example of bio-political power which Foucault identified as the control
apparatus functioning on the population as a whole. With the introduction of bio-power comes the notion of a
social body as the object of control. The professional classes, us, are often the moral entrepreneurs who patrol the
borders between ‘good’, being that which fits into the ‘norms’ and ‘bad’, being that which deviates. Consequently
the object of deviation may be subjected to forms of rehabilitation and normalisation. While the legitimacy of biopower stems from its preoccupation with optimising life chances, it has contributed to a society overly concerned
with the identification of risk. According to analyst James Hillman (1989:12) “Expectations that are only
statistical are no longer human”. The risk paradigm is potentially problematic especially if it fails to locate risk in
systems rather than individuals and families.
I am not saying that difficulties do not manifest themselves on an individual level, but locating the source of risk
within the individual conveniently allows us to ignore systemic and institutional forces that may be contributing to
people’s difficulties. In the field of addiction the dominant medical and psychological models fail to recognise
how situational, social and cultural forces influence addictive behaviour, preferring to focus on neuro-adaptation
and the addictive personality instead. I firmly believe in considering the intrinsic connectedness of the person’s
experience and the socio-political structure in which that experience occurs. Martin Baro, who popularised
liberation psychology, warned of the tendency to attribute socio-political problems to the individual. This is
especially likely to happen in neo liberal societies where the force of societal structures has been downplayed and
where the psy-complex has taken firm hold. By adopting a critical, reflective stance we may make a distinction
between ‘ameliorative’ practices and ‘transformative’ practices. In ameliorative practices we tend to the wounded,
treat the infirm and care for the disabled. In transformative practices we attempt to change those systems that
wound, marginalise and disable. Both practices are needed in society but we may be guided by a brief
consideration of John Snow’s efforts at treating cholera in London in 1854. By removing the handle of the water
pump in Broadwick Street in Soho, rather than treating the sick, he halted the epidemic.
As academics we must also turn the gaze back onto our research practices. What influences our research
activities? Who pays for them? Are we mainly interested in getting published? Do we research phenomena that
really matter to our communities or are we guided by the ‘publish or perish’ motto? Getting published in ‘high
impact’ journals is becoming an increasing preoccupation among academics whose promotions depend on it.
Academics may also be covertly discouraged to participate in community development since this might take time
away from more valued career advancing research and publishing. It is tempting to endorse the belief that our
most important task is theorising and researching. Isn’t academia’s heart intellectual after all? While increasing
knowledge is a legitimate form of action, Marx reminds us that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world,
in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.” We need to merge our professional activities with critical
politics in order to do socially and politically relevant research and interventions. I firmly believe we should not
hide behind the trap of neutrality. While recognising the struggles that we might become entangled in, we must
not shy away from them. This is our ethical mandate.
All of you here today now have advanced training in your respective fields. This training has transformed you into
cautious and ethical professionals who readily internalise the limits of your disciplines and who adopt
emancipatory approaches. Eradicating the structures that limit liberation first requires the courage to deconstruct
and challenge institutional practices and common held beliefs. By way of conclusion, I take the opportunity to
formulate some common aims that we can strive for as academics, researchers and practitioners in our respective
fields. We should attempt to balance academic rigour with grounded input and ensure that in our attempts to
prescribe a way forward on any issue we do not fail to consult with the people impacted by that issue themselves.
We also need to balance theoretical understanding with action. Conversely, the urge to act should be informed by
proper knowledge and it should be grounded in the principles of justice, inclusion and integrity. This ethical
mandate seeks primarily the good of others and overrides personal gain. We also need to distinguish between
processes and outcomes, ensuring that all voices are given exposure and that public policies and programmes that
influence the wellbeing of people are not formulated only by a class of privileged academics and policy makers.