bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conservative health policy, 2015–23
Authors: Powell Martin
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores health policy under the UK Conservative government between 2015 and 2023. It sets out three broad themes: a broad continuation of the journey from ‘peak’ marketisation towards integration; a gradual loosening of austerity; and an increased rhetorical focus on mental health, and public health and prevention. However, policy was largely becalmed by the ‘external shocks’ of Brexit and COVID-19. It may be argued that ‘events’ (external shocks, the extraordinary churn of prime ministers and health secretaries) were more important than ‘ideology’ and made ‘normal policy making’ problematic. Moreover, although the government produced many health documents, it is difficult to determine their impact, and this fits within a wider theme of a large ‘implementation gap’ between policy rhetoric and action. Despite any ‘good intentions’, the state of the National Health Service (NHS) continued to decline, and it does not look as if there will be much to celebrate in the NHS’ 75th anniversary in 2023.
Conservative housing policy in England
Authors: Somerville Peter
Published: October 2024

Conservative housing policy is primarily about the promotion of private property ownership, whether this be for owner-occupation or for private investment purposes, by means of a market that requires minimal government intervention. This chapter looks at key housing policies in England, such as the target for 300,000 new homes a year, continuing support for the Right to Buy scheme for social housing tenants, the Help to Buy scheme for first-time home buyers, changes in planning regulations to help housing developers, the Affordable Homes Programme for those on lower incomes, measures to reduce homelessness and measures to improve housing quality. It concludes that these policies have largely failed to address the key issue of housing affordability – in particular, the long-term failure to provide sufficient housing to meet the needs of the people.
The Conservatives and adult social care
Authors: Glasby Jon
Published: October 2024

This chapter reviews the Conservatives’ approaches to adult social care, moving from the legacy of the Coalition government to that of the Conservative governments since 2015. During this period, there have been a series of broken promises and a tendency to kick a number of key matters into the long grass. Sometimes this has seemed a pragmatic reaction to challenging world events and to the political complexities of these issues. At other times, there have been glimpses of traditional Conservative ideology around topics such as inheritance, the role of family, the needs of business, tax cuts and so on. Despite a pessimistic national picture, there are a number of grounds for optimism in more local, bottom-up approaches and in the increased visibility of social care during and following the pandemic.
The Enlightenment, social work and progress
Authors: Forrester Donald
Published: October 2024

The Enlightenment idea of individual rights is placed into its historical context. Key criticisms of human rights and the idea of the three generations of rights, with rights broadly related to liberty, equality and connection, are reviewed. While acknowledging the importance and validity of many of these critiques it is argued that individual rights are nonetheless a key part of a good society. This provides the background for subsequent chapters which consider different types of rights in more depth with a focus on their practice implications.
Social work, positive freedom and need
Authors: Forrester Donald
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores theoretical debates about the nature of need. Arguments about objective or subjective need are presented, and it is suggested that the most widely agreed resolutions of this dilemma – which argue for individuals needing resources to pursue their own aims – lead to further dilemmas. In particular the issue of capacity, considered in the previous chapter, once again arises. In addition there can be tensions between what individuals believe they need and what society is willing to provide. Social workers are often at the heart of such debates.
Assessment as theory development
Authors: Forrester Donald
Published: October 2024

This first chapter of the final part of the book begins the process of considering the practices of a rights focused social work by focusing on social work. Common theoretical approaches to social work assessment are presented, as well as some key policy developments relating to assessment with in child and family work. They are argued to tend to focus on what information should be collected, and while the importance of analysis is often emphasised it is rarer for there to be a focus on how to do such analysis. The chapter argues that assessment is a form of evidence informed theory development. The idea of Realist social work assessment is introduced, and suggested to be a strong foundation for a practice that allows rights focused social worker to combine the views of the individuals, the social mandate and the professional view of the social worker to be combined into a provisional theory.
Neighbourhood Policing
Authors: O'Reilly Carina
Published: October 2024

This book examines the UK’s neighbourhood policing model of community policing – a strategy to enhance police legitimacy and public confidence by building a better relationship between police and the public. Hailed by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary as the ‘cornerstone’ of British policing, it has struggled in recent years due to budget cuts and a change in policy emphasis. This book situates neighbourhood policing in wider debates about the purposes of policing. It explores the social, political and theoretical context surrounding neighbourhood policing and, in a series of chapters, critically assesses the mechanisms through which the model supports confidence and legitimacy; including engagement, visibility, problem-solving, partnership working and community-building. It examines the impact of political and organisational support on the model’s effectiveness, and explores the future of neighbourhood policing, including challenges to both the model itself and to the wider police role. The ability of police forces to connect with the communities they serve remains of central importance. This book advocates for the enduring relevance of neighbourhood policing and sets out a template for how effective neighbourhood policing can be achieved.
Overview
Authors: O'Reilly Carina
Published: October 2024

This chapter introduces the book and situates it in its broader international context. It discusses the definitional difficulties associated with community policing and communities in general. It notes the historical development of the approach in the US and the UK, and some of the barriers to its implementation, but also the variable success of the strategy in the Global South in comparison to the Global North. Finally, it sets out the book’s approach and its exploration of effective practice.
Social and political context
Authors: O'Reilly Carina
Published: October 2024

This chapter argues that the model of neighbourhood policing that developed in the UK was profoundly shaped by the priorities of the New Labour government in power at the time it was introduced. Ideas such as localism and the potential of partnership work, and the power of the public sector to build communities, are still integral elements of the model. However, the context has since changed profoundly – particularly with regard to austerity, to the relative weight paid to public confidence, and to ‘crime-fighting’ as a primary purpose of the police. It explores how neighbourhood policing has fractured as policing has been pulled in multiple directions with limited resources.
Partnerships
Authors: O'Reilly Carina
Published: October 2024

Chapter 7 looks at the recent history of partnership working in policing. It outlines and critically analyses policy to frame current guidance and best practice in partnership working. It then examines the evidence on what best supports effective partnership working and the potential for co-production with partners and communities, as well as interrogating this idea in the particular context of policing. Finally, it outlines the kinds of conflicts in values that partnership working can throw up, and how police can deal with this.
Researching for social justice: an introduction
Authors: McGarry Kathryn , Bradley Ciara , Kirwan Gloria
Published: October 2024

This chapter introduces the what, the why and the how of this edited collection. The chapter begins by exploring the ideas that frame a social justice approach to research. It then introduces the contributions, which explore and illustrate the nature of research for social justice and the transformative potential of social research, before outlining how a social justice agenda can be operationalised throughout the research process.
Epistemic privilege as a social justice issue: knowing injustice and justice for knowers
Authors: McGarry Kathryn
Published: October 2024

What counts as knowledge, and who counts as an expert? This chapter will explore (1) how knowledge in research is a social justice issue, (2) how injustices occur, and (3) how research for social justice can challenge and displace such injustices. By exploring critical theories of knowledge and the concept of situated knowledges, and by drawing on examples of research with disenfranchised groups, this chapter will illuminate social justice concepts of recognition and representation. The chapter aims to provide readers with a critical discussion of knowledge production and knowledge producers in research and seeks to identify how social injustices occur through knowledge production and to consider how we as thinkers, researchers and practitioners of social justice can contribute to methodologies which challenge injustice, displace traditional inequalities in research and undertake research which questions and empowers and ultimately transforms ways of knowing.
Using a social justice lens in research engagements for community work and youth work practice
Authors: McMahon Sinead , Bradley Ciara , Tierney Hilary
Published: October 2024

Community work and youth work are social justice-oriented professions and practices. Youth workers and community workers have many engagements with research in the work that they do. Most of the current literature provides these practitioners with advice and support on how to conduct small-scale research in their work. This chapter explores the relationship between these social justice practices and research. It discusses the broader engagements practitioners might have with research including the use of research to inform practice, acting as participants and gatekeepers in external research agendas as well as the commissioning and management of research. In addition, this chapter provides an opportunity, through the use of question prompts, for practitioners to consider their engagements with research using a social justice perspective.
When objects speak louder than words: material ethnography in social justice research
Authors: Kirwan Gloria , Swords Calvin
Published: October 2024

Objects embody meaning. As a research method, material ethnography provides researchers with a route into those meanings through the study of objects to which people attach meanings related to experiences in their lives. As a methodology, it is particularly useful in the context of research which involves populations whose experiences have been overlooked and under-interpreted in mainstream culture, as often those experiences lack a language or other symbolism that is readily accessible to the researcher. This methodology facilitates the study of complex issues through the meanings which an individual attaches to objects which they associate with their lived experience. In a study regarding the relevance of belongingness to mental health recovery, the authors adopted material ethnography as a portal into the experiences of members of a peer-led social club. Through the discussion of objects chosen by the participants, the symbolic representations of those objects revealed much about the issues of freedom, self-determination and the right to associate which surrounded the efforts of the participants to create a social space which they controlled. This chapter argues that material ethnography provides a powerful research tool for all researchers interested in social justice-based research.
Critique of the Political Economy of Poverty, Part 2: conceptual maps and definitions
Authors: Boltvinik Julio
Published: October 2024

I identify four groups of poverty definitions (PD): the N conventional approach (NCA); Townsend’s and Sen’s definitions, which are failed searches for a new approach (FSNA) as they try to replace N (with lifestyles and capabilities, respectively); the dominant economistic approach (DEA); and the New Paradigm (NP)’s definitions. Since utility is unobservable, the DEA in fact replaces it with the ‘satisfaction of expectations’ or by a tautology in which poverty is ‘insufficiency of income to reach a referential level of income’. I build typologies of N, satisfiers (S) and WBS, and in a table organise them into my holistic view of the economic process of N satisfaction. I classify N in four groups following Maslow. On the basis of Marxian philosophical anthropology, I identify seven types of S. WBSs are classified as stated in Chapter 1. PD are characterised by the breadth/narrowness of their N-conceptions, including S and WBS. NCA and FSNA are reductionist in three dimensions which are structurally linked. The DEA rejects the concept of N placing itself in a conceptual vacuum. The table also expresses the NP’s vision of the economic perspective of N satisfaction, evidencing the enormous gap between the Political Economy of Poverty (PEP)’s conceptions and mine.
A typology of poverty measurement methods: a critique of direct and indirect poverty measurement methods
Authors: Boltvinik Julio
Published: October 2024

The typology classifies poverty (P) measurement methods (PMM) into normative (N), semi-normative (SN) and non-normative (NN), as well as direct/indirect and one-dimensional/multidimensional. Combined PMM use both direct and indirect indicators. Direct PMM are based on reported household (HH)/individual living conditions. Indirect PMM identify if HH resources are enough to meet needs (N). My typology is compared with Ringen’s and with PMM described by Gordon et al. Five groups of PMM were consolidated: non-normative, indirect one-dimensional, indirect bi-dimensional, direct, and combined. The chapter describes/criticises non-normative methods which are all indirect one-dimensional and don’t base their P line (PL) on N. I don’t consider them as proper PMM, as P is a normative concept. The chapter describes/assesses indirect and direct, N/SN PMM included individually. As all are partial, the critique of not considering all well-being sources (WBS) is applicable to all of them. Five are PL-PMM, but they differ on how they define PL. Two are food-P-only PMM, one is an overall income PMM, one is subjective PL, and the last, objective PL. Three bi-dimensional income–time PMM are included. They assume time as a WBS.
All directPMM are normative-multidimensional. Two are Latin American: the original variant (OV) and the improved (IV) of unsatisfied basic needs (UBN). Both deprivation index variants are British. Enforced Lack of Socially Perceived Necessities (ELSPN), based on a survey of perceptions, presents a step forward but has problems. The Acute Poverty Index (UNDP) is ultra-minimalist; its thresholds do not respect the dignity principle. The Individual Deprivation Measure (IDM) replaces usual HH measures with an individual one; it is based on participatory research. Revealed/objective UBN thresholds PMM identifies UBN profiles of the income-poor/non-poor and classifies a HH as poor/non-poor according to how close their UBN-profile is to those profiles.
Redeemed by reproduction? Exploring compulsory motherhood and abortion stigma
Authors: Palm Selina
Published: October 2024

Drawing on the South African context specifically and the international context more broadly, this chapter focuses on religiously informed social norms that contribute towards abortion stigma. It explores how Christian beliefs around motherhood, procreation, sex, women and family intersect to situate abortion as a sin, and where religion and culture can entangle to create an aura of morality around refusing abortion. It advocates for the need for those within these faith traditions to critique, engage and disrupt the underlying beliefs behind these norms. The author draws on two main sources for this: first, her professional work as a researcher engaging faith actors to end violence against women and girls; and second, her personal experiences as a Christian believer, qualified theologian, lay faith leader and married woman who has chosen to remain childless. This forms part of a feminist methodology committed to the integration of personal experiences and political engagement. Key theological myths around motherhood are examined with the aim of allowing new theological imaginaries around abortion to flourish within communities of faith as part of a wider commitment to reproductive justice.
Pastoral guidelines through a reproductive justice lens
Authors: Weiderud Emilie
Published: October 2024

The impact on public debate of faith-affirming perspectives on abortion is limited, with trust in faith actors low. Visualising the journeys that faith communities have taken on this issue is thus a crucial contribution to shining a light on much-needed work, counteracting the domineering anti-abortion perspectives. One faith community that has taken a more affirming position on abortion is the Church of Sweden. In 2005 the institution published practical guidelines entitled, When life does not turn out as imagined, on how the institution and its actors could handle and relate to abortion in the context of everyday life in ministry or pastoral care. Situating the analysis within a lived religion framework, this chapter focuses on exploring these guidelines, to examine what elements can be defined as a practice leaning towards a justice-oriented, feminist practice, and whether they have potential to reduce stigma. The chapter further explores what, within the guidelines, can be seen as reflecting parts of the framework of reproductive justice and provides critical analysis on the implementation and impact of the publication.
Sri Lanka: abortion and Buddhism – a conversation with Dakshitha Wickremarathne
Authors: Wickremarathne Dakshitha , Bloomer Fiona
Published: October 2024

Sri Lanka is a country that presents contrasting realities when it comes to the issue of abortion. With a population of 20.9 million, most of whom are Buddhist, it has a well-developed free-to-access health system, with a clear focus in government policy on reproductive health. However, it has one of the strictest abortion laws in the world, which stipulates that abortion is illegal unless the life of the mother is at risk. Post-abortion care is available within the health system. Clandestine abortion services have been reasonably accessible and attempts to reform the law have been met with multiple barriers, including the influence of conservative religious gatekeepers. In this chapter leading activist Dakshitha Wickremarathne addresses three key questions: how the law impacts access to abortion; how the socio-cultural context impacts policy making; and how Buddhism positions abortion.
Introduction
Authors: Clarke Kris , Lee-Oliver Leece , Ranta-Tyrkkö Satu
Published: October 2024

This introduction to the edited volume, Decolonising Social Work in Finland: Racialisation and Practices of Care, coalesces a transnational community of social workers, educators, advocates and scholars to identify the long-term impact of coloniality extant in Finnish social work practices and to envision how diverse practices might move us towards deeply needed decolonised futures. This introduction discusses Finnish social work in the context of coloniality and futurism.
Social workers’ perceptions on structural challenges for minorities’ social care
Authors: Turtiainen Kati , Anis Merja
Published: October 2024

The chapter focuses on the responsibility of social care services and the social work profession to develop structural and institutional conditions for service provision. The data consist of social workers’ group discussions and written texts. The research asks how social work experts understand the structural factors of social welfare organisations that limit the opportunities of migrants and lingual minorities to receive just and appropriate services; and what kinds of social relations are needed to improve just outcomes for the clients. The theoretical background is grounded in Iris Marion Young’s theory of social connections and responsibility. The results show that the understanding of culture is simplified and injustices are not actively identified or denied. It suggests enhancing a reciprocal relationship with clients, advocacy with stakeholders, management and within the nation-state to overturn unjust legislation.
Job Insecurity and Life Courses
Authors: Bertolini Sonia , Goglio Valentina , Hofäcker Dirk
Published: October 2024

The relationship between unstable work careers and family transitions into adult life can vary according to the personal circumstances of individuals, as well as the welfare state system of the country.
Drawing from survey data and interviews across Europe, this in-depth study explores how worker instability is perceived and experienced, and how this ‘perception’ in turn affects individuals’ economic and social situation.
Using intersectional analysis and a unique focus on different life stages, the authors identify groups who are more prone to labour market risks and describe their relative disadvantage.
This powerful study will inform policy measures internationally in several social domains related to work, employment and society.
The introduction explains the research questions of the book, the approach and the methodology used by the authors. This book addresses the issue of job insecurity from a holistic point of view, considering both the objective and subjective dimension and the whole life course of individuals. The interplay between the objective and subjective dimension has often been overlooked in sociology, with studies mainly focusing on one (for example, objective) or the other dimension (for example, subjective) or competing to demonstrate which of the two, objective or subjective, can have the largest influence.
Objective and Subjective Job Insecurity in Europe
Authors: Bertolini Sonia , Goglio Valentina , Hofäcker Dirk
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the two dimensions of job insecurity, objective and subjective, across European countries. Using quantitative data for EU28 countries (including UK), the chapter provides an overview of the variation of job insecurity across different welfare state regimes and across young and adult workers. Moreover, the chapter investigates the interplay between the objective and subjective dimension of job insecurity at individual level, analyzing inconsistent profiles and characteristics of workers who are in a situation of objective insecurity but do not feel insecure (and vice versa). The findings provide an encompassing view of the phenomenon in its complexity and the emerging insights contribute to address the phenomenon at policy level.
Job Insecurity and Transition to Adulthood
Authors: Bertolini Sonia , Goglio Valentina , Hofäcker Dirk
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on young people in Europe in conditions of low attachment to the labour market and their decision-making mechanisms with respect to the transition to autonomous living. The results will be contextualized at the macro level taking into consideration the role of the relevant welfare state regimes. Then we will focus on how objective and subjective job insecurity affect housing autonomy of youth in different welfare state regimes.
The rationale behind the choice of the countries is driven by the mixed-method design of the chapter, which integrates quantitative data aimed at illustrating statistical regularities around the phenomenon of leaving the parental home and qualitative data aimed at investigating the meaning and mechanisms behind such transition.
Job Insecurity and Its Consequences for Older Workers
Authors: Bertolini Sonia , Goglio Valentina , Hofäcker Dirk
Published: October 2024

This chapter provides a stylized overview of key developments in older workers’ employment trends since the 1980s. Following this quantitative overview of the extent of older workers’ employment, the following sections take a look at the qualitative aspects of their employment. Subsequently we investigate how far older workers perceive their employment as being (in)secure and how this perception has changed over time. We discuss the future insecurity around income prospects in old age, considering the pension-related perceptions of today’s older employees and pensioners, but also considering the long-term pension effects of the spread of atypical employment among younger labour market generations.
Epilogue: Luxury, Corruption, and the Death Drive
Authors: Kuldova Tereza Østbø , Østbø Jardar , Raymen Thomas
Published: October 2024

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Introduction
Authors: Beck Vanessa , Brewis Jo
Published: October 2024

In focusing on menopausal women in the labour market and specific workplaces, this edited volume aims to re-theorize the management of people as it relates to the connections between gender, age and the body in organizations. The ‘bodily turn’ in management and organization studies is now nearing the end of its fourth decade (see, for early examples of this research, Burrell, 1984; Hearn et al, 1989; Acker, 1990; Brewis and Grey, 1994), and work which critically unpicks diversity initiatives dates back at least to the early 2000s (for example Kersten, 2000; Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000; Dick and Cassell, 2002). Despite this, the menopause is still rarely discussed in management and organization studies, the sociology of work and employment literature or HRM research. In this introduction, we outline exactly why menopause is a workplace issue as well as reviewing both contemporary UK organizational practice and recent academic research in this space. The introduction concludes with an overview of the volume chapter by chapter.
Menopause and Trade Unions
Authors: Beck Vanessa
Published: October 2024

This chapter is based on UK data related to trade union activities and trade union members. These data show that raising awareness among trade unionists leads to an increase in conversations about menopause, and that a more diverse group of individuals, including cis men, are participating in these conversations. The chapter argues that the engagement that trade union representatives stimulate and encourage around menopause shows the relevance and importance of the trade union movement to diverse workforces. It is also discussed how addressing the needs of individuals experiencing menopause transition at work can lead to improvements in employment and working conditions overall. This means that increasing social awareness of menopause and of trade union activity in this field would make for greater union leverage to ensure broader workplace change.
Susan Christopherson: On (Still) Being Outside the Project
Authors: Clark Jennifer
Published: October 2024

Susan Christopherson’s contribution to the discipline of economic geography involved expanding the field to include a broader set of epistemologies, methodologies and sites of inquiry. Christopherson’s work challenged both what counts as an economic geography question and what is considered an economic geography explanation. She was part of a cohort of academics who pushed the analytical focus beyond the formal functions of traditional economic actors to unpack how institutions and intermediaries operate within regional and national economies to produce different spatial outcomes. Christopherson’s work brought contingent and precarious labour into focus before it was a central concern of the discipline. And her research sustained that focus on labour and labour markets across a variety of sectors and industries including film and new media, energy, high technology, and manufacturing. Tracing Christopherson’s contribution to economic geography highlights the empirical challenges faced by economic geography during the rise of neoliberalism as regional policy sought to meet devolution, privatization and deregulation with intermediaries and industry-driven partnerships rather than formal forms of governance. This chapter describes Susan Christopherson’s contribution to economic geography as both what she produced and how she chose to produce it.
Susanne Soederberg: A Critical and Multidisciplinary Global Political Economy
Authors: Tawakkol Lama
Published: October 2024

Transcending disciplinary boundaries, Soederberg takes seriously questions both within and beyond orthodox and mainstream understandings of the global economy. While she primarily employs a Marxian framework with strong emphasis on historical materialism, Soederberg complicates classic Marxist approaches by accounting for different structures of power, including imperialism, gender and race. She provides nuanced and more comprehensive analyses of diverse social and political phenomena that might not immediately seem connected. Surveying her various works and arguments, I interrogate how Soederberg’s contributions are significant to the field of (global) political economy and how she adds to the understanding and formulation of (critical) economic geographies, even when some of her focuses might not immediately be thought of as questions of geography. I argue that, through her emphasis on power, analysis of benefits and interests, and historical understanding of capitalism, Soederberg provides rich, comprehensive and multidisciplinary analyses of her topics. She brings together various scholarship, making her arguments applicable to a host of questions and geographies beyond those she directly investigates, and contributes towards a more critical, global, relational, empirically grounded and fundamentally political understanding of global capitalism. She thus also provides a useful framework and agenda for future research and political mobilization.
Simona Iammarino: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Economy
Authors: Pugh Rhiannon
Published: October 2024

This chapter is an introduction to the work of Simona Iammarino, Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics. Due to her prolific research track record, it necessarily picks and chooses certain elements of her work that were deemed central to the recent evolution of the economic geography field broadly speaking. As an interdisciplinary academic, with a varied experience of working across different subjects, Iammarino’s contributions are quite wide-ranging and branch into economic and management fields as well as economic geography narrowly defined. Her work has made major contributions to our understanding of various topics at the core of economic geography, including: multinational corporations, regional development trajectories, university–industry collaborations and innovation dynamics, to name a few. By blending the author’s reading of her collected work with insights gained from interviews with close collaborators and PhD students, this chapter paints a picture of her contribution to the academic development of economic geography, but also to the social fabric of the discipline.
Consumption: Advancing Postcolonial Perspectives from the Global South
Authors: Sarayed-Din Luiza , Hughes Alex
Published: October 2024

Studies of consumption have long been positioned at the intersection of economic and cultural geography embracing the interplay between industry and commerce and the lifeworlds through which goods and services are purchased, used and experienced. Economic geographers have played an important role in mapping and conceptualizing the commodity chains linking consumers with local, regional and global systems of production, as well as understanding landscapes of retail and household economies. This chapter acknowledges a rich suite of consumption studies to which economic geography has contributed, but it also seeks to unsettle dominant narratives of consumption driven by Western framings. We suggest that perspectives of postcolonial economy help to foreground more inclusive and diverse geographies of consumption and theorization from Global South settings. To demonstrate this, we take food as our empirical focus and specifically examine changing discourses of food consumption in Brazil. We use a postcolonial lens to broaden the analysis of domestic food consumption in Brazil, revealing its plural contingencies and histories. In doing so, we place the values and models of food consumption in Brazil centre stage, with all its potential to inform critical and plural perspectives on contemporary economic geography.
Industrial Landscapes: From the Geographies of Production to Everyday Life
Authors: Carr Chantel , Larkin Natasha
Published: October 2024

This chapter sets out a research agenda that seeks to refocus attention on industrial landscapes at a time of intense change brought on by decarbonization. It begins with a brief overview of the rich history of geographical work on industrial landscapes. The chapter emphasizes the contributions of feminist economic geographers and those who have written about embodied labour process, who have developed nuanced and holistic approaches to understandings of work, skill, households and everyday life. Drawing on examples from recent research projects led by the authors in the steel and coal sectors, the chapter explores how these literatures shed new light on two overlooked aspects of industrial landscapes: invisible labour and workers beyond the paid workplace. It concludes by calling for a broader emphasis on the lived experiences and social relations that shape workers lives beyond paid work, in future research on industrial transitions. As the world grapples with the need to shift away from fossil-fuel dependency, such work is urgently needed to support those communities on the front line of a new wave of structural change that is already transforming industrial landscapes.
Labour: Reckoning with Inequality through ‘Divisions of Labour’
Authors: Worth Nancy
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the economic geographies of labour. In its framing, it includes geographic research on labour published within several subdisciplines of human geography including economic geography, labour geography and social/​cultural geography. While economic geography positions labour as one part of a wider economic system involving firms, the state, and production and consumption networks, labour geography centres the worker’s active relation to capital. Research on labour issues from social/​cultural geography often offers a more expansive definition and consideration of labour, beyond wage labour while also digging into the identities and experiences of workers. Taken together, this chapter reckons with the diversity of economic geography research on labour through the lens of inequality, considering five different ‘divisions of labour’ as well as self-employment and informal labour. It argues that geographers need to be attentive to what is new: work organized through digital platforms, the rise of automation, knowledge work that is increasingly disconnected from physical place, but also all the ways that inequalities within labour under capitalism endures. As technology creates change in the lives of workers, exploitation may take new forms, but the pressure to extract value from workers remains.
Future Finance
Authors: Dörry Sabine
Published: October 2024

This chapter engages with future finance from a perspective of financial production and practices, which link social systems across scale. Finance has undergone several transformational shifts, thereby deeply affecting these links with other social systems that define their functioning, their organization and governance. Importantly, future finance stands at multiple crossroads, confronted with a range of vast, far-reaching challenges, including geopolitical shifts, technology-induced changes and strong sustainability imperatives. Not least, all this raises the question of to what degree finance as an increasingly self-serving industry can be redesigned to the benefit of the wider public by creating public wealth more broadly. This chapter sets some overall parameters, including law and legal practice as pivotal, yet largely neglected, ordering and governance mechanisms, and it provides cursory evidence for their importance. It thereby suggests new directions for geographical research in the framework of a practice-oriented, forensic-like research programme that links the societally and economically transformative processes of financialization with altered production modes of finance, thereby stressing the importance of both law and legal practice, and geography.
Workplaces of the Future
Authors: Richardson Lizzie
Published: October 2024

This chapter contends that any attempt to understand the future trajectories of the workplace must address not designated sites but rather interrogate the modes of spatial definition and transformation constituting contemporary geographies of work. It begins with the premise that the definition of ‘the workplace’ is historically and geographically situated, meaning that uncovering processes of defining working space can therefore reveal a more differentiated politics of work. The chapter proposes that contingency to spatial form – meaning the absence of a fixed relation between function and location – is central to understanding future workplaces. It outlines three modalities of spatial contingency apparent in current geographies of work. First, workplaces that were previously formally designated and fixed in location now frequently have a flexible spatial definition, most notably the office whose nominal working activity can be carried out beyond a specific office building. Second, this flexibility in turn requires greater coordination of working arrangements that produce mobile workspaces typified by logistical media and logistics work. Third, the coordination necessary to maintain flexible spatial definition itself requires new or greater efforts of workplace articulation that is often excluded from formal work definition but nonetheless is an integral infrastructure for work to take place.
In-between
Authors: Willim Robert
Published: October 2024

When media and technologies withdraw, they can seem to vanish into thin air. They become ambient, part of the atmosphere. Ethereal. A kind of technology-induced effortless presence of services and conveniences becomes part of everyday life, offering pleasures and conveniences. Oftentimes it is all ignored, just like the elements we live in and with. What are the prerequisites for the technologically influenced ambiences of Mundania, and how do these ambiences merge with the practices of everyday life?
Identity and Belonging: Exploring Intersections
Authors: Britton Joanne
Published: October 2024

This chapter considers questions of identity and belonging by exploring various signifiers of identity connected to understandings of family. The chapter begins by explaining how identity and identification and intersectionality are useful analytical tools to aid investigation of Muslim family life. It considers the relevance of religion and ethnicity as key forms of identification before moving on to explore various interconnected place-based forms of identification. Transnational and diasporic forms of belonging are explored first, followed by national identity and connected politics of belonging and, lastly, local attachments to place. Engaging with these various axes of differentiation is shown to be important in illustrating the diversity, complexity and changing character of Muslim family life.
Dissection Photography
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

Contemporary audiences are often shocked to learn that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, medical students around the world posed for photographic portraits with their cadavers; a genre known as dissection photography. Featuring previously unseen images, stories, and anecdotes, this book explores the visual culture of death within the gross anatomy lab through the tradition of dissection photography, examining its historical aspects from both photographic and medical perspectives. The author pays particular attention to the use of dissection photographs as an expression of student identity, and as an evolving transgressive ritual intricately connected to, and eventually superseding, the act of dissection itself. The book’s additional goal is a theoretical exploration of the visual, material, and popular cultures surrounding the dissected cadaver; its power as an abject and ambiguous subject-object; and the ways in which culture influenced the initiative nature of dissection and dissection photography.
Photography Is Dead
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

Understanding why medical and dental students of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were seemingly impelled to create dissection photographs requires one to step outside all conceivable comfort zones and embrace a type of photography that exists in flagrant opposition to the ethics of the modern world. To fully comprehend the importance and influence of photography and dissection upon American students in the 1880s and 1890s, readers must spend some time in the 1860s and 1870s, the decades immediately preceding the genesis of dissection photography as a quantifiable genre. This chapter discusses that in these years leading up to the era of the dissection photograph, popular perceptions about death and photographs of the dead placed the camera and the cadaver along similar paths. Eventually, these symbiotic trajectories merged; commingling death and the photograph via a series of inseparable intellectual, literary, and aesthetic comparisons. The resultant cultural fusion spawned a new species of imagery, photographs of the deceased; a nebulously defined organism whose dual purpose was to memorialize mortality, while also bearing witness to death; true inglorious death.
Defining Disgust: Abjection, Photography, and the Cadaver
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores conceptual and theoretical applications of abjection toward the dissected cadaver, dissection photography’s most abject element throughout its 50-year evolution. Also examined is the cycle associated with the cadaver’s ambiguity as dual subject/object. Particular attention is shown to the direct correlation between its abject otherness and the transformative processes essential for its utilization by medical students for both anatomical dissection and, later, photographic commemoration. To the lay reader who has never dissected nor witnessed a dissection before, the concept of the abject and the abjectified body assists with coming to terms with the myriad attitudes and questionable behaviors students adopted during the era of the dissection photograph. Of note are the substantial shifts in student–cadaver posing conventions. These shifts rendered the dissected cadaver almost completely ambiguous; not only through the destruction of its structural unity and form, but the dissolution and derision of its personhood. The theoretical concept of the abject provides clarity and context to the underlying signifiers associated with dissection photography. It is an ontological lens through which readers may objectively interpret, re-examine, and reckon with the genre’s more transgressive traditions.
No One Ever Did: Dissection Photography and Female Identity
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses the inclusion of women in dissection photographs, particularly those associated with the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, the nation’s first degree-granting medical school for women. By the time dissection photography became a ubiquitous tradition in 1900, it was not uncommon for women to study medicine, nor to see women populating dissection photographs; be they intermixed in crowds at coeducational schools or comprising the totality of dissectors within single-sex dissection rooms. However, as this chapter shows, despite the significant increase in their representative agency, women – unlike their male counterparts – were rarely photographed misbehaving or dehumanizing cadaveric remains due to harsher public scrutiny of their professional identities.
Flesh in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

Due to the limitations of the photographic medium and subsequent photographic printing, answering questions about the realities of cadaveric skin involve countless variables on both sides of the anatomic and photographic spectrum. Ultimately, the aesthetics of the photographed cadaver cannot be trusted. This chapter argues that throughout the defining era of dissection photography (1880–1930) the cadaver’s photographed skin and muscle contributed cooperative proof of its abject, ambiguous, and inassimilable nature. The author examines this assertion in detail, focusing on the disruptive uncertainties and inconsistencies of cadaveric skin, as shown throughout 20th-century amateur-made dissection photographs. Agents of disruption demonstrate the capacity to disturb reliable visual translations of the natural textures, color translations, and tonal values of dead flesh, and include, but are not limited to, common types of photographic image deterioration, the limitations of early 20th-century photographic technologies, poor lighting, as well as natural decomposition processes, and the eccentricities of period embalming techniques.
Location, Location, Location
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

Poor lighting affects the outcome of any photograph. In the case of a dissection photograph, it can also contribute to the ambiguous appearance of a cadaver’s skin and bones. This chapter discusses how the lighting and location of a school’s dissecting room influenced the quality of the photographs taken inside. Particular attention is paid to the differences between attic and basement dissecting rooms and the challenges of taking photographs in either space, especially those requiring magnesium flash. Also of note, is a case study focused on the environs associated with ‘Chris’ Baker, the African American janitor of the Medical College of Virginia who was also a prolific resurrectionist. This chapter discusses how racially motivated perceptions ‘othered’ Baker and his essential role in dissecting room culture. When coupled with the limitations of early 20th-century posing conventions, most left over from the antebellum era, Baker had to be segregated from students or dehumanized when posing for dissecting room portraits.
Anatomical Deuteranopia
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

Collectively, dissection photographs demonstrate a pervasive attribute of aberration that breeds frequent visual and cultural misunderstandings over the color and tonal value of a cadaver’s skin. For example, during the era of the dissection photograph, red was recorded by the camera as near black. Thus, using the cadaver’s photographic appearance as the sole means of determining a cadaver’s race is a method replete with error and misconception. Complications are compounded once we include additional variables, such as improper embalming techniques, or the body’s natural processes of decomposition. This chapter explores how photography is not an entirely truthful medium, and why caution should be taken when using extant dissection photographs as a reliable witness of racist acts toward communities of color in the dissecting room.