bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Methods of Study
Authors: Ganapathy Narayanan
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on the methodological approach employed in the study, which draws from the ethnographic tradition to investigate the Omega gang. With over two decades of experience in the field of crime, violence and criminal subcultures, the author has established a relatively good knowledge of the criminal underworld and has acquired the necessary skills to engage with deviant groups effectively. Ethnography served as the primary method of data collection, although the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the incorporation of additional qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, case studies, the narrative method, and life history interviews to supplement the ethnographic data. To ensure authentic insights, the author engaged with various other sources for triangulation. While the research primarily relied on qualitative data, secondary data from national census statistics and government agencies were also incorporated to enhance the investigation. By adopting a multi-method approach, the current work aims to connect the ethnographic data on the Omega gang with a historical and structural analysis of the everyday experiences of Malays as both a racial minority and constituents of the urban poor.
Conclusion: Law, Drug Crimes and Marginality
Authors: Ganapathy Narayanan
Published: October 2024

This chapter shifts the focus from the Omega gang to the government’s war on drugs and highlights how this approach inadvertently and disproportionately impacted the Malay community more than the other ethnic groups. This phenomenon reveals the intersecting issues of class and racial disparity within society. The term ‘mass imprisonment’ is deemed to be a misnomer because it did not affect all segments of society equally, but instead concentrated its impact on one specific social category, disregarding differences in class and race. Ironically, the over-representation of Malays in correctional facilities has contributed to their increased involvement in gangs both inside and outside of prisons. Despite massive government investment in social support for returnees and their families, Malays find themselves trapped within the criminal justice system as revolving-door prisoners, as their disproportionate contribution to recidivism perpetuates this cycle. Furthermore, their families, who already face multiple vulnerabilities and inequalities, become entangled in the intergenerational deprivation resulting from the collateral consequences of repeated imprisonment. This, in turn, often leads to the next generation’s involvement in crime and drugs, fuelling the continuous cycle of gang participation. The net effect of imprisonment, familial disorganization and deprivation is further marginalization, criminalization, stigmatization and exclusion from mainstream society for the Malay community.
Spatial (In)justice and Hot Flushes in the Workplace: Some Musings and Provocations
Authors: Brewis Jo
Published: October 2024

This chapter is based on survey and interview data from two UK empirical projects. It focuses on the fact that shared space at work often leads to conflicts around temperature and ventilation between menopausal people experiencing hot flushes and their colleagues. The chapter uses Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ concept of spatial justice to analyse the data, which is based on his notion that this justice is rooted in ‘the conflict between bodies that are moved by a desire to occupy the same space at the same time … the emergence of a negotiation between bodies’ (2015, p 3). This is not, typically, a conflict between equals, and often leads to the sedimentation of existing patterns of inequity, in the workplace as elsewhere.
Making Sense of Subcultures: Interpretive Practice and/in Subcultural Theory
Authors: Williams J. Patrick
Published: October 2024

This chapter considers the significance of interpretive practice for theorizing and studying alternative subcultures. The chapter first defines interpretation in terms of interpretivist and social constructionist frameworks and situates the subculture concept within interpretive practice. It then offers a brief history of subcultural theory as interpretive practice, focusing on the subcultural theories produced in the American Chicago School of the 1920s and the British Birmingham School of the 1970s, highlighting their interests in marginalized, deviant, and spectacular groups and cultures. Finally, the chapter introduces the contributions to the volume and frames them using three analytical distinctions: whether or how scholars approach social phenomena using the subculture concept; the significance of context for interpretive practice; and how scholars and research participants or subjects embody the practice of interpretation.
No More Heroes: Portuguese Punk and the Notion of Subculture in the Global South
Authors: Guerra Paula
Published: October 2024

This chapter is based on two main objectives: to provoke a transdisciplinary approach to the study of subcultures by facilitating the encounter between sociology and cultural studies that has remained historically far away; and to provide a critical application of the concept of subculture outside its Anglo-American comfort space in the context of Portugal—a country in Southern Europe that starts from a sociohistorical position of modernity that is radically different from the central hegemonic context. When we launched ourselves into the study of youth cultures more than a decade ago, the question we asked was: ‘And after Hebdige?’ It is undeniable that many of Hebdige’s (1979) positions have not aged particularly well—often because of the ‘holes’ identified in our previous research works. But this statement is, above all, a privilege that comes from knowing the end of the story—or, more correctly, from having already had access to some of the ‘scenes from the following chapters’. We are talking about a theoretical perspective that has taken its positions politically, endowing itself with a transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological source that, even today, makes many of those espousing the current transdisciplinary research rhetoric blush: nowadays, the word ‘punk’ denotes not so much a specific subculture or style of music, but commodification and incorporation of this juvenile subculture by the mainstream; consequently, it has been deprived of its original critical force.
Interpreting Chinese Punk: From Doing Nothing to Hermit Lifestyle
Authors: Xiao Jian , Dong Xinxin
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on Chinese punk phenomenon with a de-Westernized subcultural perspective. Concepts of authenticity and resistance are carefully explored and compared in both the Western and Eastern sociocultural contexts. In light of this, we introduce ancient Chinese philosophical frameworks to further interpret the punk resistance and their way of ‘doing nothing’ (wu wei) as a practice. We find that the contemporary punk spirit can be comparable with the Chinese hermit spirituality and lifestyle. Through doing this, it is hoped that our interpretation can form into a Global South stance on the issues of subcultural phenomena and the subsequent theories.
Intimacy, Exchange, and Friendship as Sensitizing Concepts: Interpreting and Teaching Subcultures through Ethnographic Fieldwork
Authors: Blackman Shane , Barnett Laura
Published: October 2024

The chapter is a joint exploration of Herbert Blumer’s (1954/1969) ‘sensitizing concepts’ as an approach to interpreting our ethnographic studies on youth and subcultures. The key sensitizing concepts we have identified in our work are intimacy, exchange, and friendship. In this chapter we show how we used our research imaginary to establish our sensitizing concepts and how this assists our sociological analysis to make sense of our data and young people’s experiences. We go on to express the importance of sharing these concepts and approaches to interpretation within our pedagogy to support our students with the study of diverse subcultures and teaching of subcultural theory. We contend that sensitizing concepts are important for interpretation because they are the link between observation, data, and theory. Through encouraging a critical dialogue using sensitizing concepts this extends our own knowledge and commits us and others to think reflexively about subculture in new ways when we apply our sociological imagination.
Case Study: Social Workers, the Compassionate Self and Disappointed Jugglers
Authors: Yuill Chris
Published: October 2024

In this chapter I wish to bring together the points I have been raising in the previous chapters in an empirical case study. The study of alienation can never be simply a philosophical exercise. All theories, especially in the Marxist tradition, require to be tested in the empirical flow of history. Doing so is vital to keep a theory alive, relevant and to allow it to develop. Unless dialogue exists between theory and empirical research, then the study of alienation will be a dead project. I explore here how and why social workers working in the United Kingdom experience alienation and how that shapes their wellbeing. The reasons for their alienation are more than workload or simple references to stress. It is to do with how they orientate to other people and their identity and sense of self.
Linda McDowell: Complex Geographies that Matter
Authors: Clare Karenjit
Published: October 2024

Linda McDowell has been in the forefront of the fusion of a range of different factors in the regulation of employment and the success or otherwise of individuals. These include gender, class and ethnicity, and McDowell shows how they interweave and in particular the difficulties that women face. There are many traditional examples, including investment banking, long a masculine preserve. Nevertheless, there is clear evidence of progress, in that women are playing increasing roles. But does this apply to newer occupations such as the creative industries? My research, influenced by McDowell, shows that socialization in and out of work is very important in these newer industries for information exchange, collaboration and acceptance into the prevailing culture. This presents new problems for some women, for example those with family commitments, or from less-privileged backgrounds or even because they are deemed not to ‘fit in’. McDowell gives another example: migrant women, often discriminated against because of their birthplace and undervalued because of their gender: a double jeopardy. Events outside an individual’s control can be important. I have studied the rapid transition to a middle-class area of a previously deprived region of East London as one result of the 2012 Olympic Games. The expected benefits to the residents did not materialize, leaving them excluded so that islands of deprivation continued to exist within a more prosperous society. McDowell’s wide and comprehensive view of the way that social and geographic factors influence patterns of employment has been groundbreaking and offers sign-posts for future research.
Resources and Extraction
Authors: los Reyes Julie Ann de
Published: October 2024

Realizing a low-carbon energy system will require a fundamental shift in the socio-spatial and socio-material bases of the global economy. While economic geography has actively contributed to this area of work, the discipline could benefit from stronger engagement with geographies outside of a few advanced economies in Europe and the US which, to date, largely inform current understandings of energy transition. In this chapter, I draw attention to limitations and gaps in knowledge that emanate from this spatial bias through examples from the Asia Pacific. I identify two strands of work, the material economy of renewable sources and the role of finance, to highlight the urgent need for research on non-Western, non-market-based economies and the (new) resource periphery. Economic geography, I argue, will be better equipped to draw out the socio-spatial differentiations and uneven forms of development that result from the transition process through an expanded geographical reach.
Beneath
Authors: Willim Robert
Published: October 2024

Large-scale distributed technological systems extend beyond, and they are in the atmosphere, like a fog or like mist. This is all built on multiple layers and arrangements of infrastructure. Technologies of various age, installed for various reasons and with various purposes, are combined. Older constructions and systems influence the way newer systems are built and organized. Infrastructures are hidden beneath streets and floors, inside walls and away from sight. The word ‘infra’ in ‘infrastructures’ is Latin and means below, under or beneath. Spatially, infrastructures are, of course, not always below, but they are often persistently staying under the threshold of attention. Under, infra, sub. Subliminal.
Openings
Authors: Willim Robert
Published: October 2024

This last chapter is a kind of terminus, but not a boundary. It opens rather than closes the book. It resonates with the truism that every end is a beginning. Therefore, several contrasting considerations will be presented and juxtaposed in an exposition of short stories; some quite concerning, others slightly banal. These can be understood as openings. Here be peculiarities, failures and frictions of practices, operations and circumstances. A cabinet of curiosities of the commonplace, the odd and sometimes the erroneous. A confession to strangeness, sometimes banal, sometimes intense. The chapter, or this small cabinet, will raise questions and instil more variation. How far can we stretch the Mundania-imaginary? The contrasting examples will point to the ambiguous nature of the variations of Mundania. Or are these examples fractures in the construct? Are these openings? To what? When is Mundania challenged by disruption, and when is mundanisation still going on despite malfunctions, frictions and discontent? What opens and what closes? For whom, how and when? There are variations in how Mundania can be experienced by different people. Uneven and often unfair circumstances. Mundanisation is based on a tense interlink between enablement and submission. Between the calming and the creepy.
Understanding Muslim Family Life
Authors: Britton Joanne
Published: October 2024

This book offers a fresh perspective on Muslim family life through an original, wide-ranging exploration of Muslim families in British society. Drawing on current debates in the sociology of family and relationships, the book explains how theories of family have overlooked Muslim families and provides a comprehensive framework for addressing this. Muslim family life is situated in time and place by exploring identity and belonging and changing perspectives of Muslim families. Drawing on influential decolonizing approaches, the book explores how narrow, stigmatizing perspectives shape dominant understanding of Muslim families. By examining an increasing diversity of family forms and practices, the book shows how Muslim families are highly visible through being positioned as problematic and invisible because of discrimination. In doing so, it focuses on the role of gender and generation while also considering race, ethnicity and class. Throughout, the book critically engages with the enduring importance and value of family to British Muslims. A key aim of the book is to highlight the impact of inequality, disadvantage and discrimination on Muslim family life. It promotes placing Muslim families at the heart of urgent policy solutions.
Conclusion
Authors: Britton Joanne
Published: October 2024

The final chapter brings together the various arguments presented in the book, summarizing each of the book’s main contributions. These are: developing a framework for theorizing Muslim family life, critically evaluating ideas of collectivism and familism, challenging the regime of truth about Muslim family life, taking account of the enduring role of Islam and Muslim identity, tackling poverty and inequality, and addressing exclusions. In doing so, it offers an agenda for further exploration of Muslim family life.
The Stages of an Evolving Genre
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

As a rite of passage, dissection was essential to the formation of a student’s medical identity at the turn of the 20th century. Dissection photography commemorated two key discernible elements related to the formative aspects of medical identity: they showed tangible proof of a student’s professional affiliation and confirmed the levels of psychological detachment necessary to participate in anatomical dissection. And yet, when discussing the entirety of dissection photography, one cannot overlook the genre’s glaring iconographic inconsistencies. This chapter proposes that the need of the American medical student to create divergently codified forms of dissection photographs did not originate purely from exploitative spectatorship. Rather, it evolved over time to confer identity by bearing witness to a rite of passage, as well as to become an initiation unto itself. Previously, a limited knowledge of the genre’s chronological, rather than typological, boundaries – in terms of quantities, cultural influence, and decades of operation – has prevented a comprehensive understanding that divergently themed images did not originate simultaneously. Nor did they stem from a single source with singular intent. Instead, dramatic shifts in the iconography of and intent behind dissection photography occurred years or even decades apart, built upon the foundational conventions, aesthetics, behaviors, and technologies of the past.
Of Sharp Minds and Sharpened Tools: Dissection Photography and the Ambiguity of the Scalpel
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the historiography of the scalpel within dissection photography. With the inherent ambiguity of its functionality – an implement used to cut into both living and dead bodies – the scalpel was an equal agent of violence and healing. This bifurcated utility often worked in tandem with and against its own historiography. Ultimately, strict industry-driven rules and progressive trends governing its inseparability with medical professionalism and identity caused the scalpel to become a prime target for farcical photographic subversion, with students using dissection photography as a variable, but highly controllable means to visually and viscerally transgress the blade’s proper historical, theoretical, moral, and technical function. Eventually, commemorative portraiture reflected the progressive hygienic trends of the industry, with prophylactic precautions, like the wearing of gloves, established as a new posing convention. However, within the first decade of the 20th century, once photography was adopted as the primary means of transgressing normative aspects of dissection culture, students sought to corrupt the authority, utility, and perceived safety of the scalpel by focusing on its abject qualities; specifically, becoming morally and physically impure through improper usage.
In Search of Explanations
Authors: Becucci Stefano
Published: October 2024

This chapter identifies the factors that contribute to the persistence of smuggling and trafficking in Southern Europe: restrictive migration policies, market forces aimed at workplace flexibility and deregulation, and organized crime. Restrictive migration policies fuel migrant smuggling and are the cause due to the rigid line between permission to enter for work and permanence in the country, and the institutionalization of irregularity. Beyond political proclamations against irregular immigration, the social vulnerability of migrants is salutary to an economic system increasingly based on ‘just in time’ production, satisfying the up-and-down requests of consumer markets. Globalization has gone hand in hand with the expansion of smuggling and trafficking. Worldwide trafficking profits in the last two decades have increased fivefold. Criminal groups have become increasingly transnational and more able to manage the recruitment, transportation and insertion of migrants into the sex and labour markets of Southern Europe.
Labours
Authors: MacNeil Taylor Faith
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the immaterial, affective and invisibilised labour that renting respondents carried out to replenish their relationships. It first focuses on the affective labour carried out by some social housing residents affected by intergenerational histories of racial capitalism – something the author terms ‘cumulative precarity’. The chapter goes on to explore the precarious relational labour involved in creating a sense of belonging in transient, privately rented homes, looking at relationships to home improvement and outdoor space.
Poetry as a Queer Epistemological Method: Disrupting Knowledge of the Lebanese Civil War with Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse
Authors: Delatolla Andrew
Published: October 2024

The Arab Apocalypse by Etel Adnan is a celebrated epic poem that engages in an affective discussion of experiencing violence and trauma. Written as a response to the Lebanese Civil War, Adnan engages in a critique of (hetero-masculinized) politics through textual language and visual images, a feminist queer method that both alienates and captivates the reader, reflecting the dynamics of conflict. This chapter explores how literature and the arts, especially poetry, can be used as primary source material in conflict research, providing a queer method and queer knowledge production. In the case of The Arab Apocalypse the result is a reflexive engagement regarding linearity and the political importance of trauma in conflict dynamics. In turn, it highlights the need to engage with queer feminist positionalities and experiences that emphasize alienation and non-hegemonic knowledge production to understand the experiential realities of peace and conflict.
Doing NGO Research with Diverse SOGIESC Refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey: A Conversation
Authors: Erdem Zeynep Pınar , Maydaa Charbel , Myrttinen Henri , Berchtold Helena
Published: October 2024

Research on the impacts of conflict and displacement on persons of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and expressions and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) has grown over the course of the past years, and the Syrian Civil War has been one of the main case studies that has been studied in this respect. Alongside academic research, local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have played a key role in this, and all four of us authors have been involved closely with these processes. In an informal dialogue, we explore here some of the benefits and drawbacks, some of the achievements and frustrations of conducting this research with diverse SOGIESC people in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, as well as reflecting on doing advocacy and trying to make research meaningful to our research participants.
Conclusion: Thinking (of ) Queer Conflict Research
Authors: Sjoberg Laura
Published: October 2024

Addressing what queer conflict studies research looks like is the key work of this book. Envisioning a future for queer conflict studies that complicates and even transforms how conflict research is performed, what it examines, and what it means, the authors across this volume consider seriously the theory and practice of ‘queer conflict research’—particularly exploring ‘new approaches to the study of political violence’. These ‘new approaches’ consider how methods and methodology can be queered, and what that means for conversations between queer conflict research, feminist security studies, queer international relations, and critical work in security and transitional justice. It does so in three parts dealing with different dimensions of queer conflict research: queer approaches to conflict research, queer methods in the practice of conflict research, and addressing queer experiences of conflict research. Across these parts, this book provides key insights into what it looks like to do queer research in conflict studies, and what queer conflict research’s political and epistemological commitments might be. This conclusion looks at lessons learned across the book, and makes some observations about potential futures for queer conflict research.
Chronoclasm: Real-Time Data Animation
Authors: Cubitt Sean
Published: October 2024

Chronoclasms are crises of time that occur when practices and concepts of time come into contradiction. The clash between the sovereign authority of the clock that is the material heartbeat of every computer (and every network) and the multidimensional flow of subatomic interactions enables another time to emerge, the time we call history. Temporal concepts and practices emerge into this third, historical form of time in forms that are themselves historically mutable. Close attention to techniques of animation, specifically solar, surveillance, and financial visualizations and their MPEG codec and generative adversarial network infrastructures, can give privileged entry to analysis of chronoclasm as crisis and as the underpinning structure of time under capital.
Deepfake Reality, Societies for Technical Feeling, and the Phenomenotechnics of Animation
Authors: Hansen Mark B.N.
Published: October 2024

This article aims to theorize the efficacy of fake news and its epitome, the deepfake, in terms of the technicity of the internet. On this account, fake news is triggered and informed by the disjoining of image from the vaster causally efficacious and embodied environment that would normally inform it. The author draws on philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s conception of propositions as ‘lures for feeling’ that precede belief and judgment in order to argue that fake news operates through a human–technical entanglement which cannot be engaged and critically evaluated by treating the internet as a channel or host of communication. Rather than just toxic content that happens to circulate on the internet, fake news is a product of the internet as socio-technical machine: the combination of superficial content and time-critical reception channels the capture of embodied logic into the genesis of purely actual images efficacious in a well-nigh automatic way. This socio-technical capture of embodiment operates in the service of what is here called the perfect simulacrum: an image that is not received by being embodied but rather dictates its own embodied reception as pure, unanchored ‘presentational immediacy.’
Risk Perception, Climate Change and Disasters of the Alpine Environments: The Mont de La Saxe Landslide
Authors: Dall’Ò Elisabetta
Published: October 2024

Alpine environments are facing a set of complex changes due to climate change impacts such as glaciers and permafrost melting, slope instability, landslides, avalanches and extremes events. These play an increasingly crucial role for the future of those who live there. This chapter analyses the case of the Mont de La Saxe landslide (in the Italian sector of Mont Blanc) from an anthropological perspective. The landslide involves a large sector of the southern side of Mont de la Saxe. It threatens both Entrèves and La Palud, two densely populated villages in Courmayeur, a well-known tourism area. The landslide also threatens the E25, an important highway crossing continental Europe from north to south. This chapter will focus on how local communities respond to this long-term disaster with particular attention on perception (memory, history, culture) and on practices carried out to be prepared and to mitigate the potential devastating effects. The ethnographic research was carried out between 2016 and 2017 among some alpine communities located in the Ferret valley and has explored the local risk perception and the practices and policies enacted to face the emergency.
Under the Smart City Paradigm: The Social and Spatial Transformation of L’Aquila City Centre
Authors: Tomassi Isabella
Published: October 2024

This chapter critically reflects on the ‘smart model’ implemented in the reconstruction of L’Aquila after the 2009 earthquake. The smart city (SC) model should be understood as a techno-centric and depoliticized infrastructure and urban management platform. The chapter explores the social composition changing after urban planning choices made by local authorities and powers. The chapter identifies SC narratives based on 35 interviews from different actors involved in the reconstruction of L’Aquila. It shows that the reconstruction of L’Aquila is not by a ‘headless’ means but is taking a very precise direction. The urban plan design seems to have been superseded in favour of a cybernetic or smart management of the city to come, revealing the deep collusion between global programmes of smartification of urban systems and private interests in knowledge economy. The SC paradigm reveals the determination to follow development pathways and progress myths that are the root causes of vulnerabilities and disasters. The chapter reflects on a blind spot in public planning that is increasingly coming up against private use of urban land and dispossession and makes it more difficult to rebuild the relationship between citizens and the post-disaster territory. The chapter, therefore, allows understanding the violent capitalist disruptions in post-disaster contexts.
Local and Professional Knowledge in Post-disaster Reconstruction: Overlaps and Differences in Maierato
Authors: Pascale Francesco De , Antronico Loredana
Published: October 2024

In post-disaster reconstruction, it is important to consider the social aspects for improving the design, development, implementation and management of measures for risk adaptation, mitigation, and reduction in both emergency and ordinary conditions. In fact, considering a holistic approach that includes the historical, cultural, psychological and socio-economic dimensions in the context of the affected areas is essential for assessing the success of post-disaster reconstruction. This chapter aims at investigating different aspects related to the social dimension of post-disaster reconstruction in the context of the case study of Maierato (Calabria, Southern Italy). In February 2010, this town was hit by a large landslide, which produced relevant social and economic impacts. The chapter, through thematic analysis, analyses how the affected communities and professionals explore and assess different experiences of the reconstruction. From the analysis, a post-disaster framework with several unresolved issues emerges, including: permanent post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) among affected people; indirect economic losses that have not yet been compensated; a lack of satisfaction with the interventions carried out and abandonment and isolation of the affected communities in the post-disaster period.
Adapting to the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Distance Learning Experience of the University of Milan-Bicocca
Authors: Zizzari Sara , Fiore Brunella
Published: October 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic reveals economic, social and cultural fragilities even in those countries that were considered structurally solid. Among the most damaged sectors, the higher education and training sector stands out with serious consequences for its stakeholders. This chapter deals with the COVID-19 emergency in Italian higher education. The emergency pointed out some vulnerabilities of Italian universities but also enlightened their resilience. In a short time, most of them were able to ensure teaching activities continuity by moving online. Teaching activities are among the main aims of higher education, but they are often taken for granted and undervalued, with research activities receiving more attention. The pandemic brought teaching activities back to the centre of attention. Therefore, it became fundamental to redesign teaching activities using distance learning methods even if almost all stakeholders (including university lecturers) were unprepared. In addition to the difficulties in accepting and using information technologies, lecturers challenged themselves with planning and designing new forms of teaching to protect students’ attendance and ensure adequate learning. The chapter reflects on the experience of the University of Milan-Bicocca. It discusses the outcomes of survey research administered to university staff and proposes new teaching strategies moving beyond the emergency.
Narrative Now: Trends and Tensions
Authors: Barnwell Ashley , Ravn Signe
Published: October 2024

This introductory chapter sets out the framework for the collection. It addresses current debates in narrative research and outlines the pressing social contexts that face narrative researchers today. It locates power, ethics, voice and representation as key issues in a time when stories of lived experience are the subject of heated social conjecture and are often instrumentalised by the uptake of narrative as a buzzword in political, corporate and media spheres. Offering an overview of the collection as a whole, this chapter also outlines the thematic sections and the guiding questions that underpin the interdisciplinary chapters.
Policy Narratives and Policy Change: The Case of Pill Testing
Authors: Bortz Martin
Published: October 2024

Over the last 30 years, policy scholarship has demonstrated an increasing concern with narrative. At the same time, there has been limited consideration of the role of narrative in processes of change, particularly from an interpretivist-constructivist perspective. This chapter therefore makes a contribution to our understanding of the relationship between these two important variables. It does this by focusing on the discursive dynamics at play in a controversial policy area – that of drug law reform. The chapter argues that narratives can shape policy change, but only when actors in key positions of power subscribe to a particular narrative in the first place. Narrative subscription can occur in two ways – either through an appeal to facts, or to values (or both). Narrative subscription therefore provides the conceptual link between policy narratives and policy change.
The Criminalised Other as Storyteller: The Promise and Peril of Bringing ‘Lived Experience’ into the Classroom
Authors: Johns Diana
Published: October 2024

Stories of the lived experience of suffering or injustice can be powerful vehicles for building empathy and insight into the stigma, shame, pain and indignity of others. Stories can create a foundation on which experiential learning builds. But just as stories can draw us into proximity with each other, they can also cast a spell of mystique or exoticism. When stories evoke discomfort, or challenge our sense of how things should be, they can create distance between ‘us’ (listeners) and ‘them’ (story-holders). Stories about the lived experience of having been locked up, incarcerated, punished – for doing the wrong thing – can be such a place where imagination and indignation collide. This chapter explores this rocky narrative terrain between empathy and antipathy in the context of teaching undergraduate criminology students about the harms of imprisonment and the challenges and possibilities of penal abolition.
“I can’t believe how much I’ve done”: Joan and the Evolution of Her Life Story
Authors: Henningham Nikki
Published: October 2024

This chapter draws on the case study of an oral history life narrative of an elderly woman to consider the ethical responsibilities of oral historians recording the stories of people with dementia. Using a pseudonym, Joan’s story raises important questions about how we respect a narrator’s wish to be heard at a time when they are often regarded as ‘unreliable narrators’ by the people closest to them. Joan’s memories of a traumatic event do not accord with the people who now have authority to speak on her behalf. Do they have the right to stop her from speaking out? If people find the courage to tell ‘untellable stories’ later in life, who are we, who follow them, to deny them their truth?
Songs as Narratives: Ethical Tensions in Midnight Oil’s Dead Heart (1986) and Gadigal Land (2020)
Authors: Dean Liz
Published: October 2024

As a vehicle for narratives, songs’ generative potential can assist change, record histories and changes with time. How songs’ stories are engaged with and responded to are also shaped by space and place: listening from home, at a concert, in a small venue, alone or with other people, from a specific geographical setting. The narratives of Midnight Oil’s songs, Dead Heart (1986) and Gadigal Land (2020), in part recount the story of British colonial/settler impacts for the sovereigns, Indigenous peoples of Australia, and convey attendant difficulties of who can tell which story, when. This chapter explores how upon listening to these two songs’ stories and how they are sung, the ethical tensions between the messages the Oils hope to convey and how they achieve this are potentially productive in both intended and unintended ways.
What Are You Hearing Right Now?
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

Introducing ‘Stretch’ and his reading of the soundscape, here the process of acclimating to the prison environment and the implications of this for relegating the interview. Stretch reveals the centrality of sound to Midtown social life and sense-making and attuning to the soundscape are briefly outlined.
Talk to Me
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

Here the challenges of balancing disparities between personal ethics and those guiding practice in the intimacy of prison spaces are explored. What are the limits of the researcher? How are these preserved when confronted with profound distress? This chapter then explores the strange experience of being locked in a cell with the governor and what this revealed about closeness and reliance.
Learning the ‘Everyday Tune’
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

Derek, a senior officer, instructed on the centrality of learning the ‘everyday tune’ of the place for practising jail craft. Each place, and various spaces within it, has its own standard music and it is deviations from this that indicate something is wrong. The ‘noise’ of the place held the key to understanding the stability of its rituals and routines.
‘The Auld Triangle’
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

A Brendan Behan song about the triangle at Mountjoy, ‘The Auld Triangle’ forms the focus of a consideration of the cultural potency of the soundscape and its place in the cultural imagination. How does this explain the impact of the ‘jingle jangle’, and the ways prisoners mitigate and invert this by claiming ownership of ‘their jail’, the “biggest house in Midtown”?
The Hustle and Bustle
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

Here, the challenges of keeping busy when there is little to do are explored for what they reveal about contemporary prison life, with reference to work on punishment, the economy and unemployment. How to avoid enervating idleness in the absence of meaningful activity, work or education both inside and out?
Phasing
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

A musical term, ‘phasing’ refers to the moving out and moving back into time of different parts within a piece of music. In the context of an environment in which getting on and getting by were central to survival, listening revealed the extent of participation in processes of maintaining and restoring order, with implications for how this is understood.
Urban Infrastructure In and Out of Time
Authors: Addie Jean-Paul D. , Glass Michael R. , Nelles Jen
Published: October 2024

Abstract This chapter provides a synthetic assessment of the varied infrastructures, temporalities, and geographies encountered throughout the book. It identifies and expands upon the key thematic contributions developed across the chapters and details their collective theoretical implications for the study of time in urban and infrastructure studies. The chapter argues for the potential of infrastructures’ temporalities to inform comparative urban research while reflecting on the political and scalar challenges raised by the problematique of infrastructure time. It suggests that the task for future infrastructure studies lies in creating geographically contextual accounts of pluralistic temporal modalities capable of considering empirical details about both the microseconds involved in self-healing systems and the epochal transformations of the Anthropocene. The chapter concludes by outlining the parameters for a research agenda on infrastructure time that includes accounting for infrastructure futures, examining urban infrastructure at night, and engaging with non-Western temporal ontologies.
Death at a Planetary Scale: Mortality’s Moral Materiality in the Context of the Anthropocene
Authors: Olson Philip R.
Published: October 2024

Contemporary deathcare is being shaped by technologies and practices that draw attention to the environmental impacts of human deathcare at large scales. These concerns have elicited a moral dialectic involving the respectful disposition of individual human remains and emerging interests in collective responsibility for environmentally sustainable disposition. This chapter examines how this moral dialectic has challenged moral proscriptions against the ‘commingling’ of human remains, and how these normative proscriptions have pushed back against these challenges. The chapter concludes by suggesting that public deathcare policy may function as a site for reconciling moral tensions between the personal/individual meanings of the human corpse and the universal/planetary meanings of the human corpse.
Viral Flows and Immunological Gestures: Contagious and Dead Bodies in Mexico and Ecuador during COVID-19
Authors: Yépez Rosa Inés Padilla , Johnson Anne W.
Published: October 2024

In this chapter, based on ethnographic research from Mexico and Ecuador during the COVID-19 pandemic, we look at the tensions between institutional immunological acts designed to contain the flow of the virus and individuals’ need to maintain contact with their sick and dying loved ones. For many, institutional practices were seen to dehumanize victims, alive and dead; in the worst cases, inequality and institutional corruption revictimized patients and their families. As a consequence, citizens were forced to find creative ways to exercise their agency in the face of grief, loss and the institutional exercise of biopower. The Latin American context also shows how ‘seeing from the margins’ problematizes the notion that the pandemic was a shared experience. “We may all be in the same ocean”, as one colleague stated, “but we are not in the same boat”.
Spirit Mediums at the Margins: Materiality, Death and Dying in Northern Zimbabwe
Authors: Sicilia Olga
Published: October 2024

Taking into account that death practices have changed considerably across sub-Saharan Africa over the last century or more, two intertwined aspects of the dying process of spirit mediums in northern Zimbabwe are discussed in the present ethnography: mourning as an emotional response to death loss associated to the materiality of the corpse, and the complexities of disgust. Mourning is not always related to closure but to the continuity of bonds and open-ended processes as the death of mediums suggests. The remains are concealed from the public in a funeral that disallows public display of grief, and celebrates the spirit while burying its host. This ambiguity is emotionally conflicting for relatives in particular. If mourning can be linked to boundness, disgust closely represents the opposite extreme as one of the strongest forms of rejection. And in relation to dying and the deceased, disgust manifests in complex ways as human remains and substances are both subjects and objects shifting in radically unstable ways between the two. The case of spirit mediums in Zimbabwe may illustrate this complexity.
The Dead Who Would Be Trees and Mushrooms
Authors: Gould Hannah , Kohn Tamara , Arnold Michael , Gibbs Martin
Published: October 2024

This chapter articulates the metaphorical entailments of two emerging strands of Western vernacular spirituality, the dead who become ‘trees’ and the dead who become ‘mushrooms’. Trees feature heavily across the spectrum of natural deathcare services, as symbols of generational legacy, or as a promise of a green afterlife. More recently, fungi have been incorporated into products designed to enhance natural burial, including burial suits, coffins and pods. We critically examine the emergence of arboreal and mycelium afterlives drawing on interviews conducted between 2018 and 2021 with death technologists in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as analysis of their promotional materials and pitches at industry conferences, and analysis of the popular reception on news and social media. Both trees and mushrooms act as powerful ecological symbols, but offer up distinct configurations of the material and symbolic boundaries between human/nonhuman, corpse/nature, self/other. How is the human personhood or personal identity of the dead preserved, transformed or severed in the form of trees or fungi? What is the relationship between these trees or fungi and the community of the living? And what kind of afterlives are generated by the transformation of human life and decay into these life forms?
Beyond the Norms
Authors: Peterson Jesse D. , Dekker Natashe Lemos , Olson Philip R.
Published: October 2024

This concluding chapter connects the preceding chapters across four overarching themes. ‘Relational death’ emphasizes the inevitable socio-ecological relationalities involved in dying, death and deathcare. We draw attention to the relationalities among more-than-human bodies, their purposes and meanings, and their caretakers. ‘More-than-human bodies’ expands the scope of death studies to include nonhuman and non-organismic entities, while also situating the human corpse within ecological and material relations. ‘Purposes and meaning’ considers alternative possibilities by which the dead become meaningful or valuable to the living. We discuss emerging disposition technologies’ symbolic promises of continuation of the self beyond death. Death and the dead mean different things to other beings. Thus, we highlight death as a collective affair that becomes necessary for the continuation of lives, where meaning is not localized in the deaths of individuals but understood as integral to life beyond the bounded subject. ‘Norms and care’ elaborates on complex relationalities of community, care and labour that bind the living and the dead. We highlight the potentiality of materials to confirm and challenge notions of a good death as well as the inequalities that permeate the complex relationalities and communities of the living, dying and dead.
Street-Level Bureaucracy and the Response to Citizen Grievance
Authors: O'Brien Nick
Published: October 2024

Bureaucracy is a problem in relationships between citizens and state. The critical interface for the democratic state remains the everyday relationships between street-level bureaucrats and citizens. As a result, public authorities are the linchpins of democratic practice. Both sides of the relationship require careful nurture, especially at moments of crisis, such as the occurrence of citizen grievance. In the orchestration of these relationships, administrative justice institutions, such as ombuds, tribunals and mediators, have a role to play that is both critical and broadly political. In the discharge of that role, they have the opportunity of achieving an accountability dividend that adds democratic value. Three modes of legality – repressive, autonomous and responsive – provide a framework for interpreting distinctive approaches to the discharge of their function.