Higher education should be inclusive and diverse, with open and equal ‘opportunities’ for all.  As George Davie (1986) makes clear, this issue was debated and discussed in Scottish higher education as early as the 1900s and again (post-Great War) in the 1920s, specifically relating to the innovation of state-funded university places and the introduction of entry qualifications (in the primary form of school leaving certificates, known as Highers and A-levels).  The latter was, supposedly, to make access to higher education more of a ‘meritocracy’ and reduce the influences of finance, social class, and property-ownership on entry.  In the future, of the 1920s, Scottish university places would go to the most deserving (in terms of ability) rather than the most ‘served’.

Currently, a similar noble goal (in widening participation, or ‘WP’) has been discursively centred, with framing or ‘modelling’ attempted, via key institutional policies and projects on equality, diversity and inclusion (now known as ‘EDI’ for short).  Indeed, recently EDI has become a veritable ‘hive of industry’ as working capitals (i.e. ‘labourers’ to you and me) latch on to how the ‘field’ (a rather battle-laden term) might carry career potential and status advancement (praiseworthiness) through paper promotion, workshop or initiative leading, and the general meeting of institutional demands for ‘continuing professional development’ (CPD).  Such new higher education managerialism seeks to root-out employee bias and/or failings with regards to achieving academic harmony.

Of course, this ‘good fight’ against the triple scourges of inequality, uniformity, and exclusion (IUE) takes place along a wide front, with many salient pockets of non-progressive (and micro-aggressive) resistance.  Some battles are more prominent than others, but in the interests of equality nothing is excluded.  Alongside major battles on racism and gender-bias – which affect (and should do so) ever larger numbers and proportions of the higher education population – there are concerns for respecting neurodiversity and uniquely complex health and socially disadvantaged ‘intersections’.  Advances might be made in one area only for the extent to which another ‘set’ of people have been left behind or out becomes clear.  The ideal position (x) appears to constantly lie beyond the frontline, which subsequently occupies a minus ‘x’ (or ‘-x’) position.  As the Daily Telegraph – hardly a bastion of working class consideration – could hardly wait to point out (Friday 29^th July 2022), ‘white teenagers’ are now the group least likely to attend university!

The difficulties in making ‘historical progress’ can be elucidated, via a couple of my own experiences which raise questions about a core issue – highlighted as long ago as Marx’s 3^rd Thesis on Feuerbach (1845) – namely, ‘who educates the educator?’ and ‘how do they do this?’  A key problem is how to deploy our own understandings and language when attempting to make things right?  And thus, crack the old chestnut of ‘unconscious bias’ within the crusading faculty itself.

Case Study 1: Widening Participation to Reach the ‘Lower Classes’

In 2021 one department I teach for asked me to take part in a teacher-led ‘reflective’ research exercise under the auspices of advancing ‘scholarship of teaching and learning’ (SOTL).  The aim was to undertake a review of the department’s pre-undergraduate level interdisciplinary social sciences provision for both international foundation and access (open entry) students aiming to follow on to degree study.  It was established, as part of the ‘commission’, that a core concern was how we might “decolonise the curriculum”, that is, to examine to what extent the content (but also delivery) of our courses could be more diverse and inclusive in terms of the voices and positions being represented (or not represented).

Since I had played a central part in designing the existing courses, for both international and access students, my role was required since I was one of few (indeed, the only person on some aspects) who was still around (had survived long enough) to provide information on the original ideas and processes involved in creating those existing courses.

It could be argued I had a ‘vested interest’ in justifying or defending these courses but, truth-be-told, the creation of those courses had been complex and compromised in various ways for very practical reasons.  For instance, the international foundation course had ‘evolved’ (in 2011) out of an earlier course (dating from 2003) in which I played no part.  Certain elements involving ‘Western’ ‘dead white males’ (e.g. Plato and Locke) were retained because the lessons had proven, via trial and error, popular and pedagogically successful (with students).  Meanwhile, no ‘development funding’ was advanced for course design and new teaching materials in the first 8 years (2011-2017), other than ‘normal’ hours intended for class (or tutoring) preparation – so, to be clear, no funding for course design nor redevelopment.  The situation presented a very standard example of teacher frustration and of wanting to ‘do more’ but never having adequate time to do the quality job one would like.

Meanwhile, the Access course, whilst receiving dedicated ‘development funding’ (2017-2018) and, hence, a new course (created from the ground up – no ‘evolution’ of a previous course), still had to be framed within multiple sets of institutional demands and requirements, such as: preparing students for the available degrees they would move on to; the need to focus on academic literacies and study skills; and/or retain structural alignment between humanities, arts, and social science courses within the overall access programme.

Practical reality, from my perspective, was that if the original commissioning stages (for both courses) had contained concern for making, or a remit to remake, course content and delivery more inclusive of ‘decolonising’ perspectives then that could easily have been done at the time.  There was no invisible wall of unconscious bias holding change back.  I could have introduced and referred to (and made pedagogical use of) the work of Cedric Robinson, Eric Williams, CLR James, Franz Fanon, bell hooks, or Angela Davis (to name a few Black authors I have been interested in).  However, at the time, no practical emphasis or significance (i.e. funding) was given to ‘decolonising the curriculum’.  In subsequent years, higher education ‘discourse’ has shifted and ‘decolonisation’ has become a defining feature of learning and teaching and, thus, the review of what can (or should) be done.

The outcome of the reflection and review was that, of course, something can and should be done to make both course content and delivery (the teaching / learning techniques used) more ‘inclusive’, and it isn’t simply teaching staff (the ‘employees’ with their ‘unconscious bias’) who hold ‘progress’ back.  As a ‘teacher’ of social science, I’d love to do a whole course on CLR James, his connections with Raya Dunayevskaya, and his seminal work The Black Jacobins (1939), but there is seriously limited scope within any foundation-year focused department for such specialist courses when it comes to credit-bearing ‘programmes’ OR ‘market-based’ public-engagement short courses.  Ultimately, we serve Leviathan or the ‘market’, or educational product consumers, or political demands – or whatever.

However, the most surprising element (experience) of undertaking our course content reflection / review was something which never made the final report (and never should have), and this was related to the sometimes ‘unconscious’ class-bias of the language used to discuss and refer to our very own WP students.  For instance, I came across, in written discussion, our very own students being referred to as ‘lower class’.

In some ways such statements are a ‘sociological’ statement of ‘fact’.  How else should our target audiences and student cohorts within WP be ‘defined’ and then referred to?  But in other ways such language conjures up images and tales of My Fair Lady ­­and the ‘saving’ of the ‘lower classes’ through education.  The phrasing definitely carried a clear sense of ‘unconscious bias’, since as soon as I pointed the problem out, conscious awareness changed the ‘text’.  Indeed, such a situation was never meant to be – it was a proverbial ‘slip of the tongue’ (or ‘text’ in this case).

‘Naturally’, such pronouncements are an easy thing to make.  The higher education WP ‘sector’ is awash with references to its ‘target audiences’ using identity-laden words and phrases, and this is despite a shift in the sector’s general ‘discourse’.  That is, there is recognition that we need to change how we talk about inclusivity and diversity such that curricula and pedagogical ‘models’ draw on and meet the experiences of those to be ‘included’ (literally those who are extra mural, or ‘outside the walls’) rather the experiences of those firmly ensconced ‘inside them’ (intra mural).

Surely a first goal in the latter transformation is to get away from thinking about (never mind referring to) our own students as, somehow, ‘lower class’?  They are, first and foremost, our fellow citizens and thoroughly deserve an equal ‘billing’.

Case Study 2: Advancing Critical Thinking in Access (foundation / entry level) Students

My second ‘awakening’ – and this is definitely the kind of thing which makes me ‘woke’ – occurred at an online conference organised by the Open University (OU).  The focus and theme of the conference was ‘interdisciplinary foundation courses’ and their continued relevance within the OU.  For background information, the traditional OU degree (which starts ‘open entry’, not demanding enlisted students have any prior qualifications) begins with a (large) 60-credit interdisciplinary ‘module’ – the ones I have taught (2000-2022), namely, DD100, DD101 and DD102, have covered sociology, politics, social policy and criminology, economics, geography, and psychology.

However, growing demand for ‘named’ Honours degrees (in an identifiable subject area, that is, having a degree in ‘Psychology’ or ‘Criminology’ will make the graduate a psychologist or criminologist, and not just a ‘graduate’) witnessed the decline of the multi-disciplinary Open Degree and a clamour for more clearly demarcated higher level modules. 

When I undertook a Diploma in European Humanities with the OU (1995-1998), all 3 modules I studied (at levels 1, 2 and 3) where interdisciplinary.  However, interdisciplinary provision has been retained, for now, on Foundation (SCQF Level 7) and Access (SCQF Level 6) modules.  Hence, the conference was a chance to examine the role and relevance of interdisciplinary learning and teaching when the main focus is (should be) on student induction to academic literacies and study skills.  There were, of course, a number of workshops / sessions I attended, including a very useful one on the differences between interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary work (including the meaning of the terms).  But a standout session, from my standpoint, focused on the challenge of teaching ‘critical thinking’ to access and/or foundation students on interdisciplinary access courses.

This session generated the usual debates about how ‘critical thinking’ can be induced or instilled into new, open-entry students.  My own view that ‘critical thinking’ is not an ‘attribute’ (nor possess-able ‘trait’) which can be ‘taught’ as an individually-centred or owned ‘skill’, but is rather the constant product of a ‘social situation’, I will leave to another article.  What is of interest here is one of the responses (from a fellow participant – an associate lecturer and member of ‘teaching staff’) to the issue of how critical thinking can or might be taught.  After all, some students manage to pick the desired skill up quite easily, but others don’t – no matter how much we try to instil this desirable and highly ‘employable’ skill.

My erstwhile colleague appeared to have a STEM background (perhaps biology), and then asked (via chatbox): ‘Is critical thinking something we are born with?’

This is a controversial and thorny question!  The immediate difficulty is that the question can be read in two different ways – through socio-historical positive and negative lenses.  The positive understanding is that the possibility of ‘critical thinking’ is something we are ALL ‘born with’, and thus the challenge is how this ‘born-with’ capacity or facility for ‘critical thinking’ can be brought out (a la The Enlightenment) in each and every individual.  Consequently, the struggle lies with ‘teachers’ to ignite, or spark, the latent intellectual fuel within the student ‘subject’.  No doubt, the student also plays their ‘part’ or role, since failure of the process may (also) come down to some form of fuel dampening which makes the ignition stage more difficult in some ‘target’ subjects than others.  But at least on this understanding of the ‘born with’ question, every human individual has the potential to be, and chance of being, sparked into action.  And once the fuel is burning it will, somehow, do so for the rest of the individual’s life.

The alternative interpretation of the question, the negative one, is that only SOME individuals are ‘born with’ a capacity for critical thinking.  That is, is critical thinking something the aspiring student ‘has’ or does ‘not have’?  And can the latter distinction explain why our attempts at inducing and/or instilling ‘critical thinking’ succeed or fail?

Now, biologically-determinist approaches to human intelligence cannot be dismissed that easily.  Having worked with people with learning disabilities for almost two decades it was obvious to me that biology can and does place limitations (and quite severe ones) on an individual’s ability to learn and understand the world.  What often emerges are very different ‘realities’ about what the world (and the social world) consist of.  And beyond learning disabilities (which typically have physical or biological roots, as in brain injury or chromosomal divergence) there are many forms of biologically-rooted learning difficulty and neurodiversity which produce unique ways of learning that, of course, cannot be viewed as ‘lesser’.

On top of this, the research of political scientist Prof Karen Stenner has demonstrated that about one-third (33%) of any human population consist of ‘authoritarians’ who do not like change.  This is not a simple matter of political ideologies and allegiances, since Left-liberal populations still have a substantial portion of authoritarians even though the percentage is not as high as that found amongst Right-conservative populations.  What this comes down to, then, is what we ‘mean’ by ‘critical thinking’?  That is, are we referring to an ability for self-reflection and self-criticism, an ability to question others and what they are doing, or the capacity to see multiple points of view?

One response is to note that such differences in human populations are highly ‘marginal’.  That is, there are differences (in, say, size of brain cavity between males and females) but the tolerances are so small that in practice such measurements are meaningless.  You really need bigger ‘leaps’ or ‘gaps’ in units of what is being measured before variance in outcome or output would be distinguishable.  In short, biological factors might explain ‘something’ (at extreme points of intelligence quotients, IQs) but they don’t explain anything within a central ‘bell curve’ crowd (the vast majority).

When my fellow participant first posted the question I understood it in the positive mode.  So, it was a surprise to me (given the OU teaching and learning context) from seeing subsequent discussion that the negative mode had been intended!  Literally, is ‘critical thinking’ something you are either born with, or not?  A further, perhaps more shocking, surprise was that the question had been accepted and taken-for-granted, as if the idea that some students (probably taken to be quite a lot, given the levitation of the question) are not   capable of critical thinking is just a rather sad ‘fact’.

From the Enlightenment-inspired provision of education to the general masses – the Open University – discussion of developing ‘critical thinking’ (as some kind of skill within ‘students’) had descended into world familiar from an Aldous Huxley novel – Brave New World­ ­ – where part of the teacher’s work is to diagnose those with low capacity or potential (the Epsilons) so they might be separated from those with the ability for ‘critical thinking’ (the Alphas).  I would like to categorise the experience of this incidence as ‘quaint’, yet it is just worrying that some ‘ideas’ continued to be pervasive.

Elitism and the Division of Labour

The key social science question is ‘where do such ideas emanate from?’  Do they merely arise out of perspectives which lack lived experience of being one of the ‘lower orders’?  Or does it goes back to what Adam Smith noted in Book 5 of the Wealth of Nations, namely, that divisions of labour have the potential to make us all ‘stupid and ignorant’.

When I introduce Smith’s comments about the division of labour potentially making use ‘stupid and ignorant’ (in Access and Foundation education, but also on a not-for-qualification course I teach on Smith’s Wealth of Nations as part of public engagement) I ask the self-reflective question of whether or not Smith would have included himself as part of the division of labour which induces such stupidity and ignorance?  That is, what, if any, powers does Smith have to rise above and out of the division of labour which helps him to recognise the latent stupidity?  More importantly, as academia (university research and teaching) is yet one more ‘division of labour’, aren’t academics just as prone to being ‘stupid and ignorant’ as anyone else?

It is a wonderful belief that ‘we’ (academics, sociologists, philosophers … however ‘we’ want to describe ourselves) have superior-powers of observation, insight, introspection, research, or understanding compared to the ‘common’, ‘everyday’, or ‘unthinking’ mass of humanity.  However, as my OU colleague managed to convince me, no we don’t.  Surely ‘the some can and some can’t think critically’ position is in itself a sign of failing to think critically.  That is, it fails to reflect on the social position of the enunciator and why it is that they think they are thinking critically when they might not be.  Furthermore, the same goes for WP sector phrases such as ‘lower class’ and even ‘disadvantaged’ – why is holding the upper, higher or even middle ground understood to be an ‘advantage’?  And ‘advantage’ to or for what?

To conclude, as a community prompt aimed as much at myself as any other self, widening participation in higher education is about reaching ‘out’ and never ‘down’.  There is much to be learned by ‘reaching out’ where one set of educators can educate another set of educators.

What follows is a comparison of Mary Beard’s (2017) Women & Power: A Manifesto and Thomas Markus’ (1993) Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types on the question of power – what it is and what people should do with or about it?

Beard on Power

Beard’s Women & Power is a small collection (124 pages) of two lectures presented on the topic plus a later ‘Afterword’ responding to the rise of the #Me-too movement in 2017.  It also contains a list of Further Reading, which cements the educational-style and flavour of the (quick read) format and, overall, I would recommend it as a single afternoon read to students.

The title of the book, which I think uses the word ‘and’ purposefully between ‘women and power’, highlights how women have been ‘separated’ from power, and this forms the theme of the first lecture entitled ‘The Public Voice of Women’.  This lecture concisely outlines, referencing examples from ancient and modern works of art (featuring stories and myths), the way in which women have been ‘silenced’ throughout history (and still are) as a means of isolating them from public spaces and demonstrative actions (the speech acts) of political power.  While women have been, at times, able to voice their experience, knowledge, and expertise in areas deemed segmentally female, they have been expunged from wider matters of civic interest for millennia.

This process has taken many different but nonetheless linked forms, such as being ridiculed, ignored, shamed, threatened, punished, violated, and mutilated.  A woman’s place is ‘not’ to speak in public, and Beard reveals the sad (though hardly unexpected) continuation of such social customs and conventions in the contemporary world, despite recent historical gains made by feminists, by noting the atrocious treatment of women on social media.  Atrocious acts, of course, committed by men – though Beard subtly underlines the role women can play in undermining each other’s confidence and their own cause (the ‘don’t rock the boat’ approach).  Silencing women keeps their voices from being heard and their views, perspectives, and opinions out of public debate.

Her use of ‘silence’ reminded me of Michel Foucault’s work on the same subject of ‘power’.  It is why Foucault started to talk about undertaking ‘archaeologies of knowledge’, because archaeologists deal with human development before the appearance of written records, whereas historians deal with the ‘written record’.  Foucault’s point was that whilst studying the ‘history’ of power/ knowledge (he was very interested in the Early Modern, Enlightenment, and Industrial periods), one is also dealing with the actions and wills of those who could not write, could not speak, nor express themselves ‘on record’.  For many people and groups in society (remembering Foucault was gay) this meant their historic record is shockingly ‘recent’.  The researcher has to learn how to read between the lines, and this led Foucault to an interest geography and the use of space, where building design forms an essential component of the knowledge-archaeologists’ ‘dig’ (more on this later).

The second lecture in Beard’s book examines ‘Women in Power’, and what happens to them – that is, how women must morph into something else to meet the expectations of who holds power and why.  Classic myths are again referenced – Clytemnestra and Antigone, who display their ‘masculine’ side as ruler and rebel – and the way such examples are used by modern day critics of women in power are beautifully denoted.  Again, Beard ties the issue to everyday use of language and how this disparages women moving into positions of power.  She notes how one newspaper talked of female applicants for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and Bishop of London roles as ‘grabbing’ power.  Would the same newspaper have discussed all the previous male incumbents as having ‘grabbed’ power?  The word ‘grab’, of course, implies greed, selfishness, dishonesty, or plain old theft – the taking of something one is not entitled to.

However, despite the positive and welcome points Beard makes on the holding and distribution of power, what I did not get a sense of from Beard’s book was any clear definition of (political) ‘power’ – what it is, in and of itself.  Obviously, that men, or any single part of the community, have all the power – the ability to dominate public speech – is a bad thing.  The situation is unequal, unfair, and consequently inefficient and unstable.  Hence, power needs to be redistributed but, importantly for Beard, obtaining it should not entail morphoses nor assimilation.  For instance, women should not have to drop the pitch / tone of their voices (as Margaret Thatcher did) in order to be taken authoritatively or ‘seriously’.  Here Beard is highlighting that the required redistribution of power is about more than changing the guard and the gender / sex of the guard – it is about changing, somehow, the nature of power by enabling those who would not ‘normally’ hold to access it (whether their voice is high-pitched or not).

Markus on Power

By contrast, Thomas Markus’ Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building takes a very different approach to understanding the distribution of power within modern society and how it should be tackled when a more egalitarian outcome is being sought.  The comparison with Beard’s book is not about the different formats and purposes of their respective works.  Buildings and Power was the culmination of Markus’ career as a professor of architecture at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow) and stretches to several hundred folio-sized pages, with at least one illustration per page.  It is painstaking in descriptive detail of its many examples and case studies of modern buildings, with chapters divided by building type (such as schools, hospitals and asylums, bath-houses, libraries and recreational pavilions).  Markus’ narrative aims to build up a ‘history’ of the emergence and deployment of new (modern) building types, and how these evolve over time.

Markus was in correspondence with Foucault towards the end of the latter’s life (in 1984).  Indeed, Tom Markus personally told me (he was the external examiner for my doctoral thesis) he had arranged to meet Foucault (for the first time) in Paris (at Foucault’s apartment).  Markus arrived and rang the doorbell, but no-one was in – the previous day Foucault had been taken into hospital, where he would die.  The meeting of these two minds was not to be.  What they shared in common was an interest in the ‘unwritten’ about (unspoken of) distribution of power through built space.

Developing earlier concepts from Hillier and Hanson (1984) on ‘spatial syntax’, Markus drew on the design of room-structures, passage-ways, pillar and wall positioning, sight lines, and layering of utilities within building designs to examine how ‘positioning’ within a building’s space enabled or disabled the actions and behaviours of human subjects.  This was something Foucault had brought his readers’ attention to with regards to Bentham’s ‘panopticon’, or (more accurately) ‘inspection house’, in Discipline and Punish (1977).  The Hillier / Hanson / Markus production of spatial syntax diagrams took this approach to an entirely new level – the role of surveillance but also motion (bodily) control could be traced and laid bare for nearly any building (and even outdoor spaces such as gardens and sporting enclosures).

The conclusion of Markus’ study, which spanned analysis of buildings across Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and North America from mediaeval to modern times, though most specifically from 1730 to 1850 (the period of the Enlightenment), was that architectural designs were becoming more ‘open’ as their social usage (and successful operation) relied more and more heavily on the freedom of participants.  From deep hierarchical spatial structures (think thin-and-tall, or many floored, ‘pyramids’) to shallow equalising ones.  At the ‘unspoken’ level, power, as distributed through built forms, was being increasingly flattened.

Of course, this does not mean that a ‘flattened’ form of power is any less ‘powerful’ or controlling than a ‘deep’ one – it is certainly less ‘visible’, and perhaps that is the fundamental point.  For Foucault, his investigations into the evolution of modern power brought him to the conclusion that the power to ‘put to death’ (Sovereign power) was first replaced by the power to extend life via the control of conduct (Disciplinary power) before this power-over-life (bio-power) was finally transferred to the individual (Self-control).  That is, modern subjects of power place themselves under the watchful eye of ‘self-evident truths’ and behave themselves accordingly whether or not there is a surveyor (manager) in sight.  Gone are the straight-jacket spaces of ‘deep’ hierarchies.  Contemporary power is much more malleable, shape-shifting, and adaptable than what went before – the birthplace of power has been left well and truly behind.  Consequently, for Foucault, our contemporary period is symbolised by many more individuals (than in the past) being brought under the ‘sign’ of power as self-control.

Unfortunately, Foucault is all too often read in a dystopian mode – as a purveyor of the hopeless situation.  Power is everywhere and little can be done against it.  Women may think they now ‘have’ or possess power, or at least possess more power than they used to have.  In truth, sadly, power has subsumed them.  But this is only one way of reading Foucault.  The other is to understand him in the tradition of dystopian novelist – the siren who screams ‘look out, danger about’ with the precise aim of preventing such a subsuming into power by highlighting the dangers.  In the collection of Foucault interviews (by Paul Rabinow), Power/Knowledge, Foucault makes it clear that his use of Bentham’s panopticon was to indicate how such a form of power could never come to be – it was far too mechanical and had to be abandoned.  In that sense, Discipline and Punish can be understood as a history of ruling class dreams about how power should work, and not a history of how it has worked.

It is within this framework that Markus’ noted, to me, how we (humans as a collective) need to de-power our relationships.  It is not all ‘bad news’ in the sense that modern buildings are more open and leave people free (or freer) to interact and conduct themselves in the manner that they so wish.  For a start, not all of our relationships are ones of ‘power’.  When we go out with friends, for a meal or drink, or spend time with family (when we ‘choose’ to do so) we are, in essence, partaking in relationships where ‘power’ is suspended.

To adopt terms used by Marx, our lives consist of a realm of necessity (where we have to or must do certain things) and a realm of freedom.  The core issue is to what extent these two are ‘balanced’ with greater time being given to one over the other.  Power may well be something we have to accept at some level in our complex, highly urbanised, and spatially interconnected lives, but it is also something which can be reduced to a pre- or after-thought.  This means that the ‘aim’ (the political goal) should be to de-power our lives (a phrase I picked up from Markus) as opposed to thinking in terms of how to ‘win’ power for one or other disadvantaged or marginalised group.  Is it time to ask how we might de-power men rather than empower women?

Dual Languages of Empowerment and De-powering

Most people will be familiar with the concept of ‘empowering’ disadvantaged or marginalised groups.  Given the importance of ‘power’ within the modern world, such an approach appears to make perfect sense.  The poor are to be ‘levelled up’ and the marginalised are to be brought into the fold.  Though questions can be raised about the historical experience of such an approach.  We appear to have been levelling-up and empowering the disadvantaged for decades, but it also feels like a game of whack-a-mole.  Is it the very ‘nature’ of (political) power to distribute itself unevenly?  And at what point should we consider alternatives – how do we ‘remove’ power from our lives, pushing power to the margins?

There is no easy answer and I cannot see the phraseology of ‘empowerment’ waning any time soon.  The most important thing I took from Markus’ notion of de-powering relationships was the very possibility of asking the question.