Cathy McCormack 1952-2022

For those who have never heard of Cathy McCormack, or are familiar with little more than her name, Cathy McCormack was an extraordinary Scottish community activist, action researcher, popular educator, film maker, broadcaster, actor, author, blogger, advocate, campaigner, consciousness raiser and public speaker who was absolutely central – over four decades – to a vast array of radical community centred projects. 

Cathy finished her formal education at the age of 15, leaving school against her wishes at her parents' insistence (her financial contribution was essential to keep the family's head above water). Cathy lived most of her adult life unemployed in Easterhouse, a township of 60,000 people, thrown up outside Glasgow to accommodate the tenants of demolished tenements in inner city areas of Glasgow. When Cathy moved into Easterhouse, it was characterised by astronomical unemployment, dire relative and absolute poverty, catastrophically low levels of health, damp fungal spore infested housing, absent community infrastructure and rudimentary public transport.

In a veritable orgy of sustained victim-blaming, the people living in Easterhouse were widely positioned by many journalists, politicians and even public health professionals as responsible for their own misery, morbidity and mortality and Easterhouse was stigmatised as a community characterised by profound intra-community violence.

Over many decades, Cathy countered by emphasising the incomparably more vicious socio-structural, political, ideological, psychological and epistemological violence, the war without bullets or briefcase war, being waged on the people of Easterhouse (and others elsewhere deemed surplus to the requirements of neoliberal capitalism). This violence was delivered not by using fists, baseball bats and knives – but by development and deployment of policies and practices which manufactured unemployment, inequality, material poverty, socio-economic apartheid, oppression in abandoned ghetto-townships and 'social-scientific' practices and associated knowledges in the form of individualistic intra-psychic interventions, psychiatric snake-oil remedies etc. and problematic 'knowledges' whose only outcome was to position what was going wrong as the fault of those on whom the war was being waged.

From Easterhouse Cathy took her message first locally, then to Glasgow Council, then to the Scottish Government, then to the UK Government, then to the European Commission and then . . . around the world. Leaving aside countless international speaking engagements at conferences, workshops and so on, Cathy spent time in Nicaragua building alliances with people and groups who later reciprocated by study visits to Easterhouse. Cathy was the subject of a much-lauded feature length documentary film made in the townships of South Africa insightfully comparing South African race-based apartheid with British class-based apartheid. Cathy was invited to address the United Nations in New York.

Cathy may have finished with formal institutional education at 15 but her engagement with: Freirean Training for Transformation; Popular Education; Tenants' Groups; Trades Unions; Workers' Educational Association, a variety of middle class professional and academic allies, and so on, clearly more than made up for that. Indeed, Cathy's high degree of practical know-how combined with critical literacy may have been because – rather than in spite - of finishing institutional education at 15.

Cathy and I met properly getting on for four decades ago. I had moved from Sheffield in England (where I had been doing research into the poor mental and physical health of many unemployed people and what was responsible for it to Stirling University in Scotland to take up a lecturing position in the psychology department. I had applied for and received funding from the British Psychological Society to run a series of seminar-workshops about unemployment and mental health.

A number of eminent figures travelled to Stirling to contribute to the series including Professor Marie Jahoda, who had been a repository and relayer of international research into psychological aspects unemployment since her seminal participatory investigation of the unemployed community of Marienthal, near Vienna, in the early 1930s. Other contributors included Professor Adrian Sinfield, eminent professor of social policy at Edinburgh University who had studied and written extensively about unemployment for decades and Jeremy Seabrook, an English author and journalist who had received acclaim for his insightful, sympathetic and politically sophisticated writing about unemployed people.

The most impressive, energetic and thought-provoking presentation of all was, however, given by a group of women who I recall as insisting on presenting from the back row of the lecture theatre. They spoke with absolute authority and rafter-raising passion, were interested only in progressive action rather than 'blether' and laid down a challenge to social science academics, including those present, to reflect on whose side they were on in the war without bullets, the briefcase war, being waged on the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, the sick and any other group regarded as surplus to requirements by the neoliberal status quo. They were, of course, Cathy McCormack and some of her staunch activist colleagues from Easterhouse.  

When I met her, Cathy had already achieved far more than most of us ever will by way of salutogenic intervention. Cathy had brought her Easterhouse community fully onboard a project already piloted on the east coast of Scotland by Sonja Hunt, Claudia Martin and Steve Platt of Edinburgh University in collaboration with local community members. This project brought together tenants and researchers, including environmental health officers who measured humidity, damp and fungal spore presence in houses, and health researchers who measured the health and mental health of children and adults with scales of widely accepted reliability and validity, with activist tenants like Cathy who were totally committed to ensuring high rates of participation by residents in a double-blind design in a random sample of houses in the community.

The project demonstrated that children living in damp homes had significantly more respiratory problems, sore throats, vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches, other pains, and other symptoms than children living in dry homes. Both adults and children in damp homes had more emotional problems than those in dry homes. Children and adults in damp houses with fungal mould had significantly poorer health than those in damp houses without mould. Crucially, whether or not a tenant's house was damp depended on which street it was in and where it was located relative to the prevailing weather, suggesting that tenant's behaviour was not the cause of the damp housing.

The study in which Cathy was involved had a sample of 597 local authority households but the researchers estimated that between a quarter and a third of all council housing in Scotland was actually subject to dampness at the time of this research.

This is by no means the end of the story though. The tenant activists had agreed to maximise participation in the study, something the researchers could do little about, if in return, the researchers agreed to remain committed to promoting the interests of the tenants beyond academic publication of the findings. Accordingly, the research was reported in local newspapers, on local radio and television; it was used to stimulate concern in the housing department, the environmental health department, the regional council, the community health council, legal centres and by the housing charity, Shelter. The research was cited in court cases by tenants; by the Scottish Grand Committee in the UK Houses of Parliament and the Minister of State for Housing in Scotland; by the Housing Department in applying to the Scottish Office for extra funding; by local forums of GPs, local councillors and tenants to bring about action.

Finally, here, Cathy and her fellow activists continued the struggle to the point of organising a weekend competition in which teams of interdisciplinary technical experts, but crucially chaired by tenants, were tasked to design affordable interventions to prevent dampness and fungal spore infestation in a sample of Easterhouse houses (which did not include Cathy's house). The competition winner was titled Retrofit Solar Improvement of Thermally Inefficient or Substandard Housing. Cathy and her activist colleagues applied for and obtained a promise of funding from the European Commission if a substantial local government contribution was made. Despite severe, sustained, opposition, Cathy and her activist colleagues obtained the required commitments and a demonstration project was implemented. Evaluation of the implemented project showed it simultaneously: eliminated dampness and fungal spore infestation; greatly reduced poverty by huge fuel savings; much improved mental and physical health; and massively reduced carbon dioxide emissions.

This dampness intervention, alone, would be a huge legacy but I want to briefly write about the activist/scholar praxis to which Cathy and I were committed and which, in our case, consisted in bringing together activism, critical reflection (not criticising but rather reflection within a frame of reference indebted to critical social theory) and academic power/knowledge work (within the Foucauldian tradition).

Without a praxis dimension, scholarship and research within the academy is, within a critical frame of reference, often little more than ideologically problematic self-indulgence, going through taken-for-granted motions and playing of Glass Bead Games. Popular activism can be deeply problematic ideologically too, however, and when ideologically progressive is often sidelined, ignored or silenced by merciless epistemological violence.  Activists and scholars can both benefit from being 'critical friends' to each other, each offering the other: critique, solidarity, care and staunch comradeship in the face of persistent hostility from a range of interests and each deploying complementary skills in community-action-work and emancipatory-knowledge-work.  Cathy was one of my key critical friends and, I hope, I was one of hers.

Cathy and I tried to unpack our collaborative praxis and model it on countless occasions in front of audiences of psychology undergraduates, clinical psychologists in training, practising clinical and community psychologists, at national and international Conferences. We recorded discussions and interviews, appeared together at a book festival, discussed the war without bullets on local radio interspersed with music tracks, in the style of Desert Island Discs, in an attempt to keep the audience listening, and so on!

Cathy and I wrote and published papers together. Our last joint project, published in 2021 as Volume 10, Number 4, pages 189-242 of International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice and Consultation (Official Journal of Division 52 – International Psychology – of the American Psychological Association). This issue, which we jointly guest edited, focused attention on activism and critique in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. The title of our jointly written editorial was: Neoliberal opportunism in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Cathy was a close personal and family friend, so I have written this brief tribute to her with great personal sadness and ongoing grief but also with deep gratitude and joy for having had the privilege of Cathy sharing part of her life and work with me and for being a mentor, ally, inspiration and colleague as well as critical friend.

I have also written this brief tribute to Cathy McCormack conscious, like countless others, of enormous, diverse, losses beyond the personal: professional loss, intellectual loss, political loss and loss of solidarity in the fight against the war without bullets. It is some consolation to remember that extraordinary though Cathy and her achievements were, Cathy herself – in her biography, The Wee Yellow Butterfly – made a point repeatedly of referring to her huge network of fellow activists, community workers and professional and academic allies, as well as valuable resources and supportive organisations,  all essential "to make the world a better place", without whom and without which Cathy could not have achieved what she did and which could, can and must make it possible for others to continue and develop Cathy's work.

If you are interested in finding out more about Cathy McCormack's work, I suggest you read The Wee Yellow Butterfly (2009) by Cathy McCormack with Marian Pallister (Argyll Publishing) (ISBN 978 1 906134 29 7).

A full list of Cathy's other outputs: special issues, journal papers, book chapters, films, blogs, broadcasts, YouTube addresses etc. can be found in a special issue of The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, which I had the privilege of guest editing, which was devoted to the work and influence of Cathy McCormack. It was titled Wars With and Without Bullets and was published in 2019 as Volume 19, Number 1, pages 1-85 of The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

This tribute first appeared in the Autumn JCPCP.

- David Fryer left his position as Professor of Community Critical Psychology at Charles Sturt University, Australia in October 2011 to devote more time to applied critical theory and promoting resistance to neoliberal oppression. He is grateful to The University of Queensland where he currently has an honorary position providing him with library facilities and the countless other resources available to academics.

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