Factory History

Coordinators : Görkem Akgöz and Nicola Pizzolato

SESSION I: jeudi 2 novembre, 10h30-12h30

Factory regimes and economic crises

Modérateur : Lars Christensen

1)    Narratives of labour: troubles and latent conflict in a Fiat plant

       Elena Dinubila, Ph.D in Anthropology, Ethnology and Cultural Studies, University of Siena

Relying on the case-study of the Fiat-Chrysler plant located in the town of Melfi (Southern Italy), the paper that I would like to present in this session will combine a diachronic perspective with an anthropological approach to outline the problems related to the factory work. It will then show how these troubles affect the workers’ ordinary life and generate conflict on the shop floor. Drawing upon the workers’ narratives, I will demonstrate through the analysis of the problems emerging from a specific context, to how they could be related to the wider global transformations of labour.

First, I will focus on the workers’ complaints about the working organisation and its health and social consequences. Emphasis will be laid on people with a partially-reduced work capacity (RCL) caused by occupational illnesses, which constitute approximately 50% of all factory workers in Melfi. The critical position of the RCL workers, due to the difficulty of relocating them in the manufacturing space, becomes a source of tension between “peers” on the shop floor, and therefore opens up discussions on the theme of the conflict.

Secondly, I will argue that the conflict, rather than resulting from the capital-labour relation, emerges from a horizontal hierarchical system that calls into question the traditional notion of class. In Melfi, the conflict between equals is mainly due to having different access to privileged positions in the workshop. In this sense, it reflects a system of distribution and circulation of goods and services on which the external community is also based. The issues of the troubles and conflict at work here need to be tackled by analysing the workers’ relationships. However, unlike some traditional work studies that dealt with this topic as an isolated subject of study, my paper will address it in the attempt to connect labour relations with the external social order on the one hand, and the management politics which emphasise the workers’ participation in decision-making, on the other.

2)  Labor conflicts at the Soviet concession enterprises in the 1920s and early 1930s

Irina Shilnikova, National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (Moscow), Faculty of Economic Sciences.

The 1917 Russian Revolution led to the domination of the Soviet state in all spheres of society, including the economy and labour relations. During the years of War Communism (1918-1921) private property was almost completely eliminated. The country was plunged into a deep economic crisis. During the new economic policy (NEP), conducted by the Soviet government in 1921-1929, small private and joint stock companies were admitted to the economy to overcome the economic crisis.

During the NEP period concessions (including foreign ones) were one of the forms of interaction between the state and private/joint stock companies. At the same time, the state treated concessionaires as ideological and political enemies. Therefore, communist party, economic and trade union organizations, defending interests of Soviet political leadership, controlled each step of the concessionaires and interfered in labour relations actively. Labour relations in concessionary enterprises can be represented as a triangle, each of whose "corners" (Soviet state, concessionaire, workers) pursued its own goals and defended its own interests. This situation led to conflicts, which in their main characteristics differed from labour conflicts at enterprises with a different form of ownership.

The paper answers the following questions:

1) What were the main causes of the emergence, peculiarities of the course, results of various forms of labour conflicts (including strikes) at Soviet concession enterprises in the 1920s and early 1930s? The strike movement (like other forms of labour conflicts) at Soviet industrial enterprises during the NEP period is underexplored, in contrast to the labour conflicts of workers in pre-revolutionary Russia. It concerns concession enterprises especially. At the same time, the quantitative indicators of strikes in the 1920s were not inferior to those of strikes in pre-revolutionary Russia, and in some years exceeded them. Until now, labour conflicts at concession enterprises in Soviet Russia have not been the subject of a special study. To clarify in what way this pattern of ownership affected labour relations we should analyze sources on the shop floor level.

2) How did the Soviet state use labour conflicts, in particular strikes, accompanied by the suspension of work for a long time, as a tool for driving out the concessionaires from the USSR after the collapse of NEP and the beginning of the first five-year plans?

The Soviet leadership purposefully supported tense relations between owners and employees, on the one hand, and workers, on the other hand, at non-state enterprises, using for this purpose Communist party and trade union organizations. Concessions, especially foreign ones, are the most typical examples in this matter. The situation was aggravated by the fact that some industrial companies (including foreign ones) operating in Russia before the 1917 revolution returned to the economy of Soviet Russia in the form of concessions. The previous staff (managers of different levels, engineers and technicians) returned to the enterprises too. This situation aroused great dissatisfaction among the workers, who said that under the Soviet regime they had to work for the capitalists.

As long as the Soviet government was interested in the continuation of the concession activities, local trade union and Communist party organizations were instructed to smooth out all labour conflicts, especially those related to strikes. After the announcement of the policy of forced industrialization (in the end of 1920s), the transfer of private and concession enterprises to the state began. Often the Soviet government did not announce the dissolution of the concession contract, but instructed local trade-union and Communist party organizations to strike. Because of a long strike, the concessionaires suffered heavy losses and refused to continue working in the USSR.

These issues are considered in the paper for concessions in the Soviet industry as a whole (this will be done very briefly just to give general framework of the process) and on the example of one of the concession enterprises operating in the gold mining industry “Lena Goldfields Limited” located in Siberia. The labour conflicts (including strikes) at the concession enterprise “Lena Goldfields Limited” are described in the archival documents at the factory level which gives us opportunity to analyze causes and mechanisms of strikes movement at the concession enterprises. Trade union organizations warmed the hatred of the workers to the "exploiters" constantly, manipulated the mass of workers and used the labour conflict (including the strike) as a lever of pressure on the concessionaires.

Examination of the above issues at the micro level makes it possible to characterize in detail the mechanism of crowding out concessions from the Soviet economy. It resembles a raider capture in form. The State Archive of the Russian Federation has preserved a large set of documents that allow a detailed analysis of the above issues. Moreover, many of these documents had a "Secret" stamp.

3) Looking at Working-Class Citizenship from the Shop Floor: Negotiating Citizenship and National Belonging in a Turkish State Factory

Görkem Akgöz, Re:Work Institute, Berlin

Founded as a private enterprise in 1850, Bakırköy Cloth Factory had gone through a series of ownership transfers brought about by the decaying Ottoman economy on the one hand and the changing state structure on the other. After 51 years of operation under the Ministry of War producing various types of clothes for the Ottoman army, the factory came under the control of different administrative bodies during the occupation of the old imperial capital before it became the property of the State Industrial Office in 1932 and of Sümerbank, the young Turkish state’s bank and industrial holding company in charge of textile production in 1933.

Having survived such a drastic regime change, the factory’s first two decades under Sümerbank were characterized by the ruling classes’ zealous and simultaneous efforts of nation-building and industrialization. Together with other imperial factories taken over, Bakırköy Factory has historical significance as it witnessed the alleged conversion of an unproductive industrial relic of the imperial past to a Republican example of hard work and patriotism. At stake was not just an economic enterprise, but also a national space where the workers were expected to “desire productivity as a burning ambition” with their hearts “beating with care they show to their labour.” In the popular imagery of the ruling classes, industrial work at state factories was an opportunity for workers to pay their debt to the nation and its forefathers.

This paper looks at the discourses on citizenship and national belonging from the shop floor of Bakırköy Factory. In the context of the displacement and mediation of class conflict through the use of nationalist discourses, it explores the ways in which this industrial national space became the site for discursive struggles on national belonging and citizenship. Taking the factory as a unit of analysis, the paper connects shop floor activity to the general level of politics and analyzes the shop floor dynamics of working-class collectivity by way of expanding the study of that process beyond its purely economic moment. Bringing together material on the factory in parliament discussion and media coverage on the one hand and workers’ files, the research offers a micro-historical perspective on how the industrial workplace functioned as a site for discursive struggles on working-class citizenship and national identity.

Session II: Vendredi 3 novembre, 16h-17h30

Narratives of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline on the Shop Floor

Modérateur : Nicola Pizzolato

1)     Wildcat Homers, Gamifying Work and Workplace-whānau in the Meat Industry: Re-examining the Subversiveness of Informal Workers’ Resistance

Toby Boraman, Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand

This paper presents a historical study of the rich varieties of everyday resistance by meatworkers in Aotearoa New Zealand during the 1970s and 1980s. Meatworkers were almost archetypal rebellious Fordist assembly-line workers, whose resistance often sprung from the factory floor, mainly as a response to their everyday experience of gruelling, dangerous and monotonous work. In spite of these conditions, many workers attempted to make work less alienating, and more fun and social. This ‘adaption’ led to considerable everyday resistance, including numerous wildcat strikes (nicknamed ‘homers’). This paper revisits the debates of the 1970s and 1980s that such informal resistance was either harmless and individualistic, or was radical (for example, by representing an attempt to informally self-manage work, or gain to autonomy from work altogether) and collective in nature, and resulted in overt struggle. While the literature on informal resistance predominantly consists of a-historical and Eurocentric micro studies, this study examines how indigenous Māori workers influenced informal dissent in the Aotearoa meat industry, and how over the long-term capital attempted to repress informal resistance because it hampered profits and production. Māori workers often played a key role in informal recalcitrance, helping form informal work groups of workplace-whānau on the factory floor. These were multi-ethnic extended family-like groupings that were influenced by Māori culture. However, this informal self-organisation was not universal, or without its own tensions, such as often being based on masculinity and occupational bonds to the exclusion of other workers. While the long 1970s represented a peak in the autonomy and self-organisation of meatworkers, comprehensive industry restructuring, government de-regulation and a re-assertion of managerial discipline on the factory floor during the 1980s seemingly suppressed much of the autonomy and informal resistance of meatworkers.

2)    Time and Factory Work in Bombay, 1875 – 1900

        Hatice Yıldız, PhD Candidate, Faculty of History, Queens' College,University of Cambridge

This paper examines the patterns of time use in cotton spinning and weaving factories in the Bombay Presidency. The cotton textile industry formed the mainstay of Bombay’s economy under the British rule. It accounted for about three-quarters of the workforce engaged in factories.  Its development effected numerous economic activities both in the city and in large parts of the hinterland. Based on a detailed analysis of evidence reflecting workers’ time-related experiences, this study suggests that a transition from irregular to regular work patterns did not occur with the emergence of mechanised production in Bombay. Rather, industrial capitalism flourished through a complex interaction of task-oriented and clock-measured labour. Long periods of inactivity caused by famines, epidemics or bad prices were followed by incessant work reflecting a good harvest season or favourable global prices. The limits of the human body together with tasks available in the factory provided a standard for the duration and intensity of work. Religious holidays were incorporated into factory schedules with special attention to communal and ethnic differences. Within the industrial establishment, the times of young and old, skilled and unskilled, female and male labourers were subjected to different regimes. In other words, the specialisation and diversification of tasks under the factory roof brought variety to the temporal experiences and perceptions of operatives. Subject to flexible work arrangements, many few experienced a neat Thompsonian rupture between personal and work-related functions of their time. 

Changing patterns of work and time use in British India is virtually an uncharted field of study. A handful of histories that concern cultures of time in this context have given weight on the administrative elite or middle classes. There is, accordingly, a great emphasis in the literature on the debate over the unification of time zones, which triggered nationalist reactions from a wide range of social actors. Historians have identified the long years of boycott in Bombay against the standard time as a ‘moment of self-affirmation’, in which people sought ‘the retention of what was critical to self-identity’. Indeed, defending civil time became a channel for expressing feelings of self-preservation against outside (colonial) threats to local autonomy. However, resistance did not always come from concerns associated with self-identity, and it was not framed by nationalist or modernist politics everywhere. I contend that the scholarly focus on the standardisation of clocks distracts us from a deep transformation of ideas about time. These ideas concerned what time was, and how it linked to exploitation. In many instances where local groups resisted against temporal uniformity, there existed a discontent with the terms of exchange of a quantity of abstract, commodified time. I demonstrate this point through an analysis of workplace conflicts over time-related issues, like the length of a workday or adoption of standard time in factories. A detailed analysis of these conflicts show that by the late nineteenth century, regardless of the continuing relevance of local clocks, the imagery of time as a currency had already dominated the working-class discourse in Bombay.

3) Factory Working-class Formation in 1960s and 1970s Greece: The Cases of the MEL

      and PITSOS Factories

      Stefanos Ioannidis, PhD candidate, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

The formation or re-composition of the factory working class in the postwar decades has been understood in terms of what can be described as the “farmer-to-factory-worker model”, according to which large numbers of young children of families residing in rural areas and occupied in agriculture migrated to urban areas and took up unskilled jobs in factories. This development is linked to the upsurge of working-class mobilizations in the late 1960s – or, for countries of the European “periphery” or South (Greece, Spain and Portugal), in the mid-1970s, during their “transitional” phases from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy. These mobilizations have had important consequences, including the realization of many of the workers’ demands, more democracy on the shop floor, changes in state policy towards workers’ unions and an overall “left” shift of politics.

A question that arises is what types of links can be established between the workers’ “agricultural background” and their subsequent trade union and political behavior. More specifically:

-  How should the “agricultural background” be understood? Is it confined to the agricultural work experience of the family and rural life or should it be understood as a cultural whole, distinct from ideas and practices prevailing in urban areas? In the latter case, what elements did this culture consist of?

-  Does the background of the new factory working class influence working class formation (understood in cultural and practical terms, not merely as an objective economic process) in the late 1960s and 1970s? If yes, how have the pre-existing ideas and aspirations of the newly recruited factory workers been transformed and how have they influenced their subsequent actions?

- How has factory location affected the composition and culture of the workforce? Can a distinction be drawn between factories located in large cities and those operating in remote rural areas?

- What kind of interaction has there been between new and old factory workers? How homogenous was the factory workforce of the period? How and why did young workers come to play a leading role in trade union organization and mobilizing and how did this affect their relationship with workers born in the 1930s and 1940s?

The presentation addresses the above questions by comparing two quite different factories: a) The MEL paper factory, established in the early 1960s in a rural area of Northern Greece, in the prefecture of Thessaloniki, amongst three farming villages/small towns and b) the much larger and technically advanced PITSOS factory in Piraeus, which produces home electrical appliances.

Session III : Samedi 4 novembre, 9h-11h

The factory: a social and imaginary space

1)     Farewell to the factory…farewell to the working class? Workplace ‘entryism’ and the crisis of working class politics in the 1980s

Matt Myers, DPhil candidate in History, Oxford University

My paper will use the case of a group of revolutionary militants taking up jobs at the Cowley car factory in Oxford during the early 1980s as the empirical basis to explore the changing role of the factory in the left-wing imaginaries in Britain. The concerted uptake by left-wing activists of factory jobs for political motives was a phenomenon present across Europe and North America in the ‘long 1968’. Utilising oral sources – including interviews with some of those who participated in the ‘entryist’ strategy – I will situate the experience of one hitherto untold story of workplace ‘entryism’ in a narrative mediating the space between workplace (as a discrete geographical space and its representation in discourse) and national politics. I will also utilise archival materials left by the group who co-ordinated the entry-tactic – the International Marxist Group – which have yet to be utilised in this way before. I will explore how the workers in the factory perceived the militants, and the problems and contraditions in carrying out their strategy. The story of what in France was called établissment (which has generated a huge literature – including works by Robert Linhart, Virginie Linhart, Christophe Bourseiller, Marnix Dressen, and Donald Reid) has received little or no attention in Britain. In exploring the Cowley experience, I will frame the experiences of British militants alongside debates occurring across Western Europe during the late 1970s and early 1980s. I will situate the Cowley experience alongside revaluations of the factory as the central site of left-wing political militancy and class struggle at the time. I will argue that there existed a relation of (creative) tension between the factory’s concrete existence as a site of class struggle and its symbolic role on the left as an imagined political space. This tension is fundamental, I will argue, to understanding the perceived ‘crisis of working class politics’ (to quote Leo Panitch) during the 1980s.

2)      The Breakdown of Boundaries between Workplace and Community during the Factory Occupations in Le Havre May-June 1936

Rebecca Shtasel, Phd student, University of Sussex

In the 1930s Le Havre was not only France’s second largest port but a major industrial centre, transforming its imports into ships, planes, tools etc.  It was also a centre of militancy dominated by its anarcho-syndicalist dockers’ union.  Whilst dockers were in a closed shop, factory workers only joined a union when there was a dispute and then left straight after.  Dockers had a certain freedom at work, whilst factory workers worked long hours for low wages in buildings that looked like prisons, policed by guards and patrolled by foremen armed with a stopwatch and a long list of rules.

This all changed in 1936 with the election of the Popular Front government and the promise of sweeping reforms to improve the lives of the working class.  The election was accompanied by a general strike and a wave of factory occupations throughout France which began at the Bréguet factory in Le Havre.

This paper looks at what happened at the Bréguat factory and five other factories in Le Havre. The Bréguet factory built seaplanes and had 850 workers; the Humbert sawmill employed just under 100 workers; the Corderies de la Seine, with just over a thousand workers, mainly women, made rope and metal cable; the Cie Electro-Mécanique, an electrical components manufacturers had 890 workers; the Tréfileries et Laminoirs, a metalworking factory, had 2420 workers; and the Mazeline shipbuilders (part of the Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée) had 650 workers.

What was striking about the factory occupations all over France was the pride and care the workers took in looking after the premises they were now in charge of and the level of cultural entertainment that took place.

Whilst leisure activity may have been present in factories elsewhere in Europe at this time, workers in France were dealt with very severely for doing anything other than their allotted task whilst at work. Leisure activities were certainly not tolerated.  Even whistling could lead to dismissal at the Bréguet factory because it apparently showed too much frivolity and a lack of attention to one’s work.  Only sporting activities were encouraged at, some, local factories with twenty local workplace football clubs in existence in 1937.  However, these only involved a tiny percentage of the number of factory workers that existed in the town. 

During the factory occupations, the usual pastimes found in cafes entered the factories: cards, sing-songs and conversation.  These activities were then expanded into more ambitious entertainments, from the performance of skits to parades with bands and costumes.  The entertainments chosen in Le Havre show both an engagement in national issues and yet also a local specificity evidenced by references to Norman culture.

As soon as the occupations were over, the division between factory and community was immediately reinstated.  However, some changes remained.  The workers in the metalworking industry in Le Havre who had joined a union during the strikes, decided to remain union members once the strikes were over.  They developed an allegiance to the union that had represented them, the Union of Metalworkers, led by communists and sympathisers.  For the first time, in Le Havre, the anarcho-syndicalists were challenged for their leadership of the local workers’ movement.  Whilst the dockers had been in a state of militancy for many years, always vigilant to protect the gains they had won, factory workers now also became ready to defend the improvements their strikes had won and, when the much-needed wage increases they had been promised did not appear, they continued to fight to have them implemented.

My paper argues that the memory of those carnivalesque days when the workers, for the first time in their lives, were in charge; the lesson that it was important to join a union and the subsequent fight to have wage rises implemented in the face of high inflation were what makes these occupations important.  For my argument, it is not so much what these memories and lessons add to our knowledge of the French working class in the 1930s as what they add to our knowledge of their behaviour during the Occupation. 

Pierre Laborie, in his classic book, L’opinion française sous Vichy, argues that there was a continuity between the events of 1936 and what happened during the Occupation in terms of people’s opinions and behaviour.  However, Jean Quellien, noted historian of Lower Normandy, believes that this was more the case for those living in the Unoccupied Zone.  For the people in the department of Calvados, on the Channel coast, there was no continuity; people’s reactions to the Occupation were shaped by the specific circumstances of being very heavily occupied by German troops all the way through to the Liberation. My paper intervenes in this debate by its focus on Le Havre, in the neighbouring department of Seine-Maritime.  Circumstances for local people in Le Havre changed even more dramatically than in Calvados in that the town was regularly bombed during the first two years of the Occupation as well as being occupied by thousands of German troops.  However, three issues from 1936 remained firmly within the consciousness of local workers: one was that it was a moment when they won significant demands and were in control of their workplaces; two, that they had to fight to have their demand for pay increases implemented in the face of increasing inflation and three, that they wanted to have elected workers’ representatives.  Rocketing inflation was again a serious issue for workers, especially from 1943 and workers had to fight to have their pay increased, and indeed they repeated a tactic they had previously used in 1937, in 1943.  The prominent leaders of the working class were now absent; the dockers’ union leaders having decided to collaborate and the metalworkers’ union leaders having been deported.  But the memory of the 1936 victories provided a confidence that the workers could win again.  The fact that workers vividly remembered their success in 1936 is commented on in the reports on workers’ opinion written by the Intelligence Service during the Occupation as a warning that the workers were still able and confident enough to cause industrial unrest once again, despite the high levels of repression and dissolution of their trade union.

3)      De-constructing the Industrial Palimpsest in Tophane/İstanbul: From Industrial Cultures to Cultural Industries (15th-21st Century)

Aslı Odman, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University

The historic neighbourhood of Istanbul, called Tophane, or 'Metopon' (the forehead) during Byzantine times is located on the northwestern entrance to the inner port of Constantinopolis, Istanbul. It is indeed the forehead to the immense inner port of the city, which is the Golden Horn. That natural port is in fact the 'raison d'etre' of the existence of the city. Port functions were always linked to military-industrial functions and port locations hosted also in Istanbul the first factories comparable with other urban industrialization processes in other parts of the world. Industrial activities were water-bound activities (either river or sea) up until the construction of a wider railway and road network in the second half of the 19th century.

Thus the diachronic, longitudinal reading of the spatial history of Tophane gives us the lens through which we can scrutinize longterm change in how industrial fabrication practices, use of nature and labor has changed with a longue durée perspective.

The first extra-muros neighbourhood of the 'other side of the historic city', the Pera, owes foremost its existance to the establishment of the Imperial Canon Foundry right after the conquest of Istanbul. Canon production required smaller workshop-type factories (karhane), skilled work, very specific raw materials, technology transfer and capital investment by the state. Different types of laborforce organized in guilds co-existed in the same neighbourhood around the Canon Factory, carpenters, printers or linked to port functions, like the travelling / partly sejourning seamen and the porters. Thus canon production was an integrated complex comprising more than 10 hectars at the second half of the 19th century triggering different types of industrial laborforce in and around the factory itself.

The modernization of the army in the 19th century also introduced new military factories, like the imperial small arms factory and a school to educate skilled workers for this kind of  modern military factories, i.e. İmalathane-i Harbiye. The public space was re-organize to accomodate the needs of creating the modern worker along with the modern soldier: Huge drill fields organized as squares, dwelling facilities, modern mosques, used by soldier-workers and other guild workers and a clock-tower, making the modern time of the factory and army omnipresent in the urban sphere. But there was also non-formal spontaneous sociabilities of workers and soldiers alike, like brothels and pubs contrasting the temporal and spatial order in the modern military factories at the shoreside.

After the foundation of the republic the venue of the same small arms factory (Tüfenkhane-i Amire) was transformed into a global factory of the multinational company Ford Motor Inc under the conditions of a special Free Port law. It was planned to be the center of a automotive production serving a very large company territory. It failed comparable to the imperial small arms factory conceptualized to modernize the weakening Ottoman army.

After the 1950s the neighbouhood of Tophane witnessed the change of a five hunderd year old dominance of the culture of industry to cultural industries. The port is now being radically transformed to serve the international cruiser tourism.

The main attempt of that talk will be offering a framework / matrix of analysis of how man-environment relations changed, how industry shaped and re-shaped that part of the city on longue durée. Is there a common conceptual framework, with which we can analize long-term urban change by looking at how factories change functions, skills, raw materials, technology and raison d'etre? 

4)      A Factory Museum Expresses Integrated Research Approach? – The Case of the Ábrahám Ganz Foundry Museum in Budapest, Hungary

Melinda Harlov-Csortán, PhD candidate at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary 

A factory museum that reflects on its past from diverse perspectives can be seen as possible realization of researching factory at its most complex understanding. Through the publications, programmes and exhibitions such institution can point to among others the social, technical, historical and urban relevance of the factory as well as its contemporary counterparts and influences. Accordingly, the review and analysis of these activities are not just cover wide range of possible and complex research approaches but point to certain circumstances and obstacles that would influence the proposed academic research as well. In my proposed contribution I would introduce a case study of such factory museum and analyze it from the point of view if it reaches an integrated research approach through its programs, publications and exhibition and what are the obstacles and differences to fulfill such aim. The Ábrahám Ganz Foundry Museum that is today part of the Hungarian Museum for Technology and Transport Museum was established in 1969 as a small specialized museum in Budapest right after the real iron foundry stopped operating after more than 80 glorious years. The factory played an important role in the social, economic and financial life of the Hungarian capital and many outstanding technical achievements were realized there. That is why the building became not just a museum but one of the first industrial historic monuments in Hungary. The past almost half century of this cultural institution was realized during diverse political, social and economic periods that unquestionably effected its management and strategic possibilities and the critical research of its history provides a good source to reflect on the same possibilities and obstacles of an alike academic research.