Erica Burman and Ian Parker have both resigned from the Psychology Department at Manchester Metropolitan University. Ian Parker has made his resignation statement available www.parkerian.com/mmu.rtf
While they will both, hopefully, continue to produce high quality provocative Critical Psychology work; and will find this easier outside of a department that appears to have become relentlessly mainstream, this the end of an era.
An element of psychology that critiques the ways that the discipline can uphold the status quo can only prosper in a University sector that prefers what Michael Billig called the sound of thinking over the sound of cash registers. (See this paper for a summary of Billig's ideas about rhetoric) Within a culture of managerialism critical ideas, especially ideas that lead to the questioning of the basis of expert knowledge, knowledge that Universities seek to sell, are unlikely to be popular. With academic freedom in the UK increasingly under threat I fear for the future of the sub-discipline of psychology that I have most in common with.
