The ivorine tower in the city: Engaging urban studies after The Wire

Abstract

The Wire has been viewed as a panoptic and institutional dissection of the dysfunctions of late capitalist urbanism. The accomplishment and totality of this vision has perhaps provoked introspection by academics pondering their internal efficacy (engaging students through teaching) and external relevance (through the communication of research around urban problems). On both of these fronts, academic work arguably faces a crisis as new media forms of this kind compete to ‘teach’ audiences about the city. We argue that this raises two key implications. First, that The Wire and its ilk represent a more public accessing of many of the social problems that urban studies has traditionally monitored. This suggests a need for more andragogic modes of teaching that lead mature audiences, both inside and outside the academy, toward greater understandings of urban problems. Second, the series can be related to sociological perspectives that have challenged university‐based research to be critical, relevant and of utility to deprived communities (and of a distinct hue from others stemming from government and business). We argue for elongated research and short‐term engagement practices to produce a synthetic, or ivorine, tower that, while appearing distant from public debates, works effectively in both domains.

Key words:

• The Wire
• andragogy
• pedagogy
• teaching
• research
• urban studies
• sociological imagination
• professions

Notes

1 Here we would draw attention to projects like David Simon’s Treme, Jose Padilha’s Bus 174 and Elite Squad, the films City of God and Men, Spike Lee’s When the Levées Broke, Red Riding, Spiral as like‐minded projects of longue durée that offer critical social commentary, realism and authenticity of voice but which have also been immensely popular in an era of focused, DVD boxed‐set viewing.

2 Although, as a corrective to both our concern with the apparently contemporary issue of ‘speed‐up’ and loss of concentration in learning alongside the challenges to authenticity that go with learning via media we can look back to 1967 and an episode of the cult TV show The Prisoner titled ‘The General’. We can’t provide the detail here, but the episode features a university education in three minutes communicated directly from a computer through a TV set into the brain of the viewer. The individual is then able to provide instant recall of facts but without critical reflection. It is notable that this was written and produced during the mass expansion of the university sector and around the time of the launch of the Open University in the UK.

3 Ivorine, also known as French ivory, is a synthetic substitute for ivory pioneered in the late 19th century, from plastics like celluloid, as the real product became scarce. We use this as a metaphor for the normative positioning of the academy, seen to be akin to a search for a synthesis that generates a more ethically founded or progressive outcome.