bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
(Shared) ethnicity in ethnographic research on clandestine and informal practices in the migrant and ethnic minority economy
Authors: Hiah Jing
Published: May 2022

This article addresses the methodological and ethical challenges of ethnographic research on sensitive topics such as clandestine practices in the migrant and ethnic minority economy. Drawing on related criminological and sociology of deviance literature I draw on my experiences of insider-ethnographic research in the Chinese migrant and ethnic minority economy in the Netherlands and Romania to demonstrate how stigmas related to race/ethnicity and clandestine practices can strongly shape access, rapport and researcher’s positionality in the field. Research participants’ concerns about these stigmas also revealed ethical questions on how to report on clandestine and informal practices without contributing to further stigmatisation and racialisation. At the same time, my experiences show that whether clandestine practices and race/ethnicity are considered sensitive topics is an emergent issue. In the Netherlands, due to active enforcement of clandestine practices in the migrant and ethnic minority economy, these practices were a sensitive topic of inquiry. In Romania, by contrast, clandestine practices were not treated as sensitive subject matter as these were normalised by research participants and broader Romanian society, due to a lack of active enforcement and criminalisation.
Fathering and Poverty
Authors: Tarrant Anna
Published: May 2022

This monograph reports on pioneering research from the ‘Men, Poverty and Lifetimes of Care’ (Leverhulme Trust, 2014-2018) study. It addresses questions concerning the routine care responsibilities of men in low-income localities and the resources and constraints that affect how they ‘do’ family and care on an everyday basis. Drawing on a mix of ethnographic, photographic and interview data generated with twenty-six men in different generational positions living in a Northern city in England, the relational dynamics of low-income family life are examined. The central thesis is that while policy and lay discussions of low-income men emphasise men’s absence, limited empirical focus on the household and on the role of ‘father’ as a generational identity, serves to obscure the variety of ways in which men in low-income families participate in family life in significant ways, at different times. Advancing the concept of family participation, the book reveals the contexts of significant hardship through which men in different generational positions engage in a range of caring practices. At the same time, austerity has entrenched conditions antithetical to these men’s efforts on behalf of their children and grandchildren. The analyses therefore reveal circumstances when men might be more resourced and capable of taking on care responsibilities, but also where state support may be lacking yet much needed. In a context of social ambivalence about men as carers, men with caring responsibilities remain highly isolated and welfare and market provision for ‘caring masculinities’ is neither being produced nor sustained.
Men’s caring arrangements and family trajectories
Authors: Tarrant Anna
Published: May 2022

This chapter presents analyses of men’s accounts of their family participation and family trajectories. It explores the questions of how and in which ways men participate in their families in low-income contexts and foregrounds their caring arrangements and family configurations. The diverse and divergent sets of caring arrangements described by men in different generational positions are considered, drawing on empirical examples across the cases. The findings in this chapter demonstrate how caring arrangements in low-income families are both negotiated and contested over time. This includes across familial generations, between men and women, and often in engagements with services and agencies external to families.
Familial economic circumstances and provisioning practices
Authors: Tarrant Anna
Published: May 2022

Chapter Six explores the everyday challenges men face in reconciling either insecure, low paid and inflexible work or the social security system around their care responsibilities and the contexts of significant hardship through which they engage in care. Consideration is also given to men’s interactions with welfare processes, which have become increasingly punitive under the new austerity driven welfare regime that characterises the contemporary policy context. These findings are illustrative of the kinds of earning and caring trajectories that are produced by the increasing precarity of the local labour market and the conditionality of the welfare system, which can sometimes trigger crisis and unexpectedly push families into poverty. Finally, attention is given to how men anticipate and imagine their personal welfare futures and those of their families under austerity.
Understanding the meaning of neighbourhoods for people living with dementia: the value of a relational lens
Authors: Clark Andrew , Campbell Sarah , Keady John , Kullberg Agneta , Manji Kainde , Odzakovic Elzana , Rummery Kirstein , Ward Richard
Published: May 2022

This chapter looks into the significance of neighbourhoods for people living with dementia in line with social connection, engagement, and interaction. It also includes the nature of associations people have in the immediate locale in relation to geographic proximity. In literature, outdoor spaces, built environments, and everyday technologies are identified as the three domains of activity for neighbourhoods. According to the ESRC/NIHR-funded Neighbourhoods: Our People, Our Places research, relationships are constituted through a relationship sense of place that can facilitate belonging and inclusion. Moreover, local social connections act as channels for information, interaction, support, and metaphorical safety nets in exceptional circumstances. However, local connections for people with dementia could extend beyond the conventional neighbourhoods. Viewing neighbourhoods as relational phenomena gives the perspective of understanding the overlooked geographies of everyday life with dementia.
Enabling the neighbourhood: a case for rethinking dementia-friendly communities
Authors: Ward Richard , Rummery Kirstein , Odzakovic Elzana , Manji Kainde , Kullberg Agneta , Keady John , Clark Andrew , Campbell Sarah
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores the understanding behind the emerging dementia-friendly communities (DFC) agenda. A five-year international qualitative study investigated the experience of the neighbourhood for people living with dementia and their care partners. Despite efforts to place people with dementia at the heart of the DFC movement, limited attention has been given to their actions and agency in a neighbourhood context. Spatial and affective practices of people living with dementia highlight the idea of ‘enabling neighbourhoods’. The chapter also notes the importance of engagement with diverse places and social opportunities in the neighbourhood to managing life with dementia alongside keeping up with wellbeing and social health. Ultimately, research shows the value of attending to the ‘doing’ of the neighbourhood, the transformative impact it can have on social relations over time, and the influence of people with dementia as agents of change.
Conclusion: Dementia emplaced
Authors: Clark Andrew , Ward Richard , Phillipson Lyn
Published: May 2022

This chapter explains how the book has demonstrated the diversity of theoretical and conceptual approaches to people living with dementia. The idea of a neighbourhood implies an urban bias that holds particular meaning within Global North nations, which also largely undermines the rural experience of living with dementia. Neighbourhood, then, becomes a slippery concept that simultaneously covers perspectives and lived phenomena. The chapter acknowledges how the neighbourhood perspective has limitations to the emplaced lives of people with dementia. Additionally, intersectional understanding helped spark recognition of the significance of diversity of people with dementia. However, silence remains the lived experience of most people living with dementia. The chapter also includes possible improvements to policies, research, and practices addressing dementia.
Introduction
Authors: O’Callaghan Cian , Feliciantonio Cesare Di
Published: May 2022

The chapter introduces the three main conceptual and empirical propositions of the volume. Our first proposition is that the relationship between ruins and urban vacancy is undertheorised. Our second proposition is that vacancy is an ordinary and constitutive component of urbanisation. Our third proposition is that ruins and vacant spaces are an important point of political antagonism. Each proposition is discussed in relation to existing scholarship and includes a short presentation of the chapters that address it.
Traversing wastelands: reflections on an abandoned railway yard
Authors: Jasper Sandra
Published: May 2022

Taking an abandoned railway yard on the urban periphery as a starting point, this chapter traces the histories, contemporary forms, and prospective futures of wasteland spaces in Berlin. Rather than being vacant, wastelands are vital cultural and ecological zones that have served as experimental fields for artists, scientists, and activists. To counter a speculative development perspective that renders ostensibly empty sites ahistorical and devoid of human and nonhuman life, this chapter recovers a range of cultural and scientific responses that valorise wastelands as lived and inhabited spaces. With intensifying financial interests in Berlin, the protection of wasteland spaces for public life is becoming increasingly difficult. The chapter concludes by questioning the efficacy of current nature conservation policies and other political tools to counter the rapid loss of wasteland spaces in Berlin.
Building the new urban ruin: the ghost city of Ordos Kangbashi, Inner Mongolia
Authors: Lee Christina
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores the ‘ghost city phenomenon’ in China through the lens of ‘new urban ruins’. Devoid of a thriving population, these newly constructed cities are the by-products of the country’s ambitious twin projects of mass modernisation and urbanisation, and its decentralised fiscal policies and speculative property markets that have created the conditions for the rapid development, deterioration and demolition of built environments. The chapter focuses on Ordos Kangbashi in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Zone to unpack the arresting strangeness and emptiness of the place that has, in the international media, been lambasted as China’s pre-eminent ghost city, and a testament of the hubris and flawed execution of a national future-planning agenda. Eschewing its fetishisation as a terminal new ruin, I argue that Kangbashi’s vacant spaces are important sites of spatial and temporal alterity that offer a way of moving beyond a discourse of crisis and evitable failure.
Guarding presence: absent owners and the labour of managing vacancy
Authors: Wagner Lauren
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores housing whose vacancy is purposeful and cyclical – namely, second homes. Since the early 2000’s Moroccan authorities have offered several versions of incentive programs for ordinary citizens to purchase single family apartments. Yet initial fieldwork around Tangier indicates that many of these sub-development units have been bought as second residences, vacation properties, or speculative investments by both domestic and diasporic Moroccans. Despite the political intention for these complexes to become inhabited, slum-relief housing, some portion are only periodically used, and therefore lying vacant while awaiting the return of the owner. The proliferation of housing complexes built as communities, but sold as investments, brings into relief how forms of guardianship fill the temporary vacancies left by mobile owners. With a complex history of property regulation and a strategic geopolitical and touristic position, Tangier provides both a unique and archetypical case for thinking about how property owners actively – or not – manage their property to keep it ‘filled’ in their absence.
Tracing the role of material and immaterial infrastructures in imagining diverse urban futures: Dublin’s Bolt Hostel and Apollo House
Authors: McArdle Rachel
Published: May 2022

After the global financial crisis of 2008, Ireland’s landscape was left scarred with new urban ruins, symbols of the fall of the Celtic Tiger and the austerity that followed. Activists responded to this by occupying vacant buildings, to demonstrate their belief that vacant buildings at a time of the growing homelessness was an injustice, and direct action was needed. Vacant spaces acted as resources which mobilised the political imaginations of activists. Not only do vacant spaces fuel actions, but the occupations themselves also contributed to an activist landscape creating new lifeworlds through the radicalisation of infrastructure. Even if individual squats, direct actions, and social centres do not last, the logic of occupation does. This idea of occupation endures and influences future projects. In this chapter two occupations – Bolt Hostel and Apollo House – are outlined as examples of the utilisation of vacant space as a tool for politicisation. Occupations are connected through traces, and in this chapter I focus on the material and immaterial infrastructures of these projects and how these impacted a future project. Overall, in this chapter I claim that scholars should focus on the lived, experiential, and inhabited city as a way of better framing activists’ experiences and prefiguring future cities.
Conclusion
Authors: Greener Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapter brings together the analysis from the previous six chapters, and explores the implications of the analysis especially in relation to Australia, the UK and the USA. It presents the general lessons from the book, as well as considering its method again.
No Choice, no Voice, no Exit
Authors: Wilding Jo
Published: May 2022

Public choice markets are hypothesised to ensure both quality and cost in public services, by users exercising a choice of service provider, using voice to complain or campaign about inadequate services, and exiting to another provider if they are not satisfied. The chapter argues that people in need of legal aid immigration advice do not have meaningful choice, voice and exit options. It explores the quality control mechanisms deployed in legal aid and explains why these are flawed, protecting the position of poor-quality providers while imposing punitive sanctions on high-quality providers for minor procedural errors in file keeping. It uses Akerlof’s lemon market metaphor to explain how fixed fees and an auditing regime which is blind to substantive quality drive down the standard of work in the market as a whole.
How to sustain a good life with dementia?
Authors: Ceci Christine , Purkis Mary Ellen
Published: May 2022

As shown through the book, families’ everyday lives are often, though not always, at odds with the kinds of practices and programs planned elsewhere, requiring them to adapt and adjust to priorities not necessarily their own. Guidance for practice and policy comes from the lessons shared by families: that the everyday practicalities of ‘doing dementia’ need to be part of the policy story, that shifts in daily life are never ‘settled’ once and for all, and that if formal care practices are not going to miss the ‘whole picture’ of what is going on, there is a need to build an understanding of specificity and localness into styles of getting to know families and supporting family practices and arrangements. The analyses offered have shown the range of people, materials, institutional practices, activities and relations that might, if conscientiously considered and foregrounded, not only contribute to care but create the conditions of possibility for good care at home.
Introduction
Authors: Evans Bryan , Plehwe Dieter , McBride Stephen
Published: May 2022

The chapter introduces the book and each of the chapters.
Privatizing the sacrifice: individualized funding, austerity and precarity in the voluntary sector in Australia and Scotland
Authors: Baines Donna , Cunningham Ian , James Philip , Roy Chandrima
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores austerity in relation to two major pieces of social policy recently introduced in Australia and Scotland, namely the National Disabilities Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and Personalisation Self-Directed Care. Claiming to promote human rights and consumer choice, both policies introduce cash-for-care packages that significantly change for service users, the female-majority workforce, and the organisations providing services. Consistent with austerity, need for service outstrips supply, labour markets are being rapidly restructured to offer increasingly precarious and degraded employment, including the emergence of gig work in the Australia example, and service organisations in Scotland that are unable to remain solvent in the austerity-led funding regimes. Ideological themes associated with austerity underlie and are reinforced in these programs including a state-led argument that sacrifices, patience and understanding are required of service users while the programs are painstakingly rolled-out and funding packages assessed, reassessed, awarded, and denied. Rather than protecting and empowering service users and workers under these policies, the government has instigated the further privatization of services, and the deepening of insecurity.
Market populism, its right-wing offspring and left alternatives
Authors: Schmidt Ingo
Published: May 2022

Populism is often understood as an antithesis to liberalism, without differentiating between right- and left-wing populisms on the one hand and between liberal democracy and economic liberalism on the other. This chapter challenges such views by (1) demonstrating that economic liberalism was successfully translated into market populism that gained popular support during the economic and legitimation crises of welfare capitalism, (2) tracing the rise of right-wing populism to the failure of market populism to deliver on its promises and (3) discussing the question why the left doesn’t gain more support in the face of the unpopularity of economic liberalism and widespread rejection of the new right. To explain these developments, the chapter employs a model explaining why liberal, left-wing and right-wing ideas gain enough popularity so that historical blocs can coalesce around them but also why the same ideas fall out of favour, lead to the fracturing of existing historical blocs and create opportunities for the making of new blocs around new ideas.
Austerity-induced populism: the rise and transformation of the new right
Authors: Bieling Hans-Jürgen
Published: May 2022

The academic debate on right-wing populism has strongly focused on cultural causes. Only recently, contributions showed the relevance of political economic factors. This paper builds on these approaches and highlights the impact of the European austerity agenda which was reinforced after the financial crisis. It argues that austerity has stimulated not only the move towards right-wing populist parties, but also initiated their programmatic and strategic reorientation, above all in the areas of economic and social policy. So far, however, this reorientation was disparate, selective and contradictory. This reflects the specific features of given models of capitalism and domestic political cultures as well as the particular balancing of contradictions between the bourgeois self-image of the party and the social claims of large parts of the voters.
The crisis next time: the GFC and the continuing fragility of capitalism
Authors: Stanford Jim
Published: May 2022

A decade after the global financial crisis of 2008-09, most OECD economies had still not regained normal economic and labour market conditions. Now the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the global economy into the worst crisis since the Great Depression. The advanced capitalist economies enter this crisis in an economically and politically precarious state: financial leverage and instability, fiscal imbalances, constraints on monetary policy, and household financial fragility are all worse than in 2008-09. Perhaps most worryingly, the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic institutions and processes have been battered by a decade of hardship, polarization, and populism. In this worrying context, progressive movements must develop and fight for a response to this latest crisis that will strengthen popular economic and political capacities, instead of merely rescuing a battered, financialized regime.
Three roads
Authors: Fanning Bryan
Published: May 2022

This chapter introduces the focus of the book: the development of Europe's three big ideas which have shaped approaches to social problems and social policy since the industrial revolution, namely, liberalism, social democracy, and Christian democracy rooted in Catholic conservatism. It claims that this ideological trinity was borne out of epic conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism since the Reformation and between socialism and capitalism since the industrial revolution. The chapter then explains that in charting the development of these three influential approaches to social policy, how they engaged with democratic politics will be examined. The chapter also gives an overview of the principles held by conservatives, liberals, and socialists in addressing social problems. It emphasizes that each of these three ideologies of welfare endorsed particular institutional approaches to social policy.
Utopian socialism
Authors: Fanning Bryan
Published: May 2022

This chapter takes a closer look at the emergence of utopian socialism. The earliest written use of the term socialist has been traced to a letter in the 1820s from Edward Cowper, an inventor and engineer, to Robert Owen. The latter was a successful industrialist who became renowned for reforms he introduced at the factory he ran at New Lanark in Scotland, as a campaigner for Factory Acts, which would improve the conditions of workers, and as the advocate of planned communities modelled on New Lanark, which would serve as sanctuary islands of socialism in an ocean of capitalism. Owen's proposals were rooted in a very different understanding of human nature — he accepted John Locke's account of the human mind as a blank slate that was shaped by what was empirically perceived through the five senses and agreed with Jean Jacques Rousseau that human relations could and should be remade in accordance with enlightened reason. Owen's proposals for social engineering inspired some social experiments and a wider sense that an alternative future to laissez faire capitalism was possible.
Catholic social thought versus modernity
Authors: Fanning Bryan
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the Catholic social thought during the nineteenth century which advocated corporatist alternatives to democracy aimed at avoiding class conflict and the rise of state socialism. This thought influenced several European countries until the Second World War. The chapter looks at the efforts to promote European Catholic third way alternatives to liberalism and socialism in the aftermath of Rerum Novarum and on the political contexts in which Catholic thought proposed utopian responses to secular modernity, which drew on both the Romantic Right, with its belief in 'natural' communities that needed to be protected from modernity, and a sense of Christian universalism — of being part of a Christian community.
European Christian democracy
Authors: Fanning Bryan
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the convergence of religious, political, and economic responses to pre-1945 totalitarianism that came to constitute a distinct world of welfare capitalism. The influence of religious ideas is examined through a focus on the intellectual journey of Jacques Maritain, the most prominent Catholic theologian, and political philosopher prior to the Second World War and during its aftermath. The chapter also explores how political champions of Christian democracy and of what would become the European Union, like Konrad Adenauer, combined Catholic ideas with liberal economics to create a distinct Christian democratic antidote to what were perceived as the causes of totalitarianism. Christian democracy very quickly became a prominent political force in several European countries with large Catholic populations, other than Spain and Portugal where totalitarian regimes remained in control. By 1948, Christian democrat political parties had become dominant or politically prominent in Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and in the Federal Republic of Germany following its establishment in 1949.
Legacies
Authors: Fanning Bryan
Published: May 2022

This chapter tries to look at the future, having in mind how influential thinking about social policy developed along three winding roads since the beginning of the industrial revolution in several European countries. It tackles a once influential take on how the future might play out, Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, which was published in 1992. By the end of history, Fukuyama meant ‘the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. The chapter acknowledges that the new worlds of welfare capitalism of the twenty-first century are still influenced by a range of ideologies and by the evolving functional needs of societies. It will not be possible to restore the welfare settlements of the twentieth century. Nor is it desirable to do so because social policy needs to respond to social change. Europe's three worlds of welfare capitalism took their impetus from the industrial revolution, its accompanying division of labour and technologies, and the emergence of mass democracy. The twenty-first century presents a vista of ongoing technological and social change as well as new risks that somehow need to be addressed by states, markets, and communities. Just as twentieth-century totalitarianism and the Second World War provided the impetus for liberal, Christian democratic and social democratic welfare states, so might the threat of environmental collapse or events such as the 2020 global pandemic inspire a new generation of welfare systems.
The Next Welfare State?
Authors: Pierson Christopher
Published: May 2022

This book considers the state of the British welfare regime after COVID-19 and the prospects for progressive change. It considers what has happened to the welfare state as a ‘strategy of equality’ in the past twenty-five years and whether and how this aspiration might be rebuilt in the future. It begins with a detailed assessment of the welfare record under recent Conservative governments (2010-2020) and under New Labour (1997-2010). It then traces an alternative (and forgotten) history of thinking about welfare and social change in and around the Labour Party in the period 1920-1980. Chapter Four considers the big challenges that face the welfare order after COVID-19: ageing, a changing world of work, and climate change. The fifth chapter assesses the impact on welfare and the public finances of the first year of COVID-19. The Conclusion outlines what we would need to do now to build a new ‘strategy of equality’ after the pandemic.
Introduction: A care crisis in the Nordic welfare states?
Authors: Dahl Hanne Marlene , Hansen Lise Lotte , Rhodes Carl
Published: May 2022

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the care crisis in the Nordic welfare states. The Nordic welfare model represents a ‘passion for equality’ that has been institutionalised as a political commitment to public-funded care services and to universalism. The chapter explains that this universalism has enabled women to reconcile being mothers, daughters, workers, and citizens, and increased the status of care work through care ‘going public’ and a state-supported — or state-engineered — professionalisation of care work. However, the Nordic welfare state model and the Nordic labour market model are exposed to major challenges following the turn to neoliberal politics and the financial crisis. This has put pressure on care in various ways with the increasing focus upon individual responsibilities to self-care, welfare state retrenchment, and/or austerity policies, and the focus upon quality through ‘documenting care’. The chapter then defines the key concepts of this book: care, neoliberalism, care crisis, and gender equality.
The Pandemic Within
Authors: Wagenaar Hendrik , Prainsack Barbara
Published: May 2022

COVID-19 has exposed the defects of our current political-economic order: extreme inequalities, an ideology-driven government, a greedy corporate sector, a precarious labour force and a looming climate catastrophe. This book focuses on two characteristics of contemporary societies - hegemony and complexity - that have inhibited our ability to imagine, and take seriously, better policy practices and institutions. It describes utopian reimaging as a systematic method to overcome these predicaments. Covering social infrastructure, housing, work, governance, corporate responsibility, finance, and climate change, the book outlines feasible and pragmatic solutions which are informed by a comprehensive vision of a flourishing, sustainable richly democratic society for our post-COVID world.
Ensuring a well-functioning public infrastructure
Authors: Wagenaar Hendrik , Prainsack Barbara
Published: May 2022

The impact of the Covid-19 crisis in countries where housing, education, healthcare, transport, and other services need to be bought on the free market has been much worse than in countries where such elementary needs are satisfied by public services. This chapter argues that adequate public infrastructure is a form of public wealth that forms the basis of an equal and just society. Good and stable public infrastructures should include high-quality, accessible health care, ample social housing supported by tenant protection and rent control, good, affordable public transport, nation-wide broadband and mobile phone coverage, affordable education at all levels, and a social security system that mitigates the risks of life. Modern societies and production processes are far too complex to be left to the devices of “the market”. Two approaches are discussed: the UK-based model of Universal basic Services and the continental model of state produced and delivered public services. This chapter also expands the discussion of utopia as method.
Housing is a public good, not a commodity
Authors: Wagenaar Hendrik , Prainsack Barbara
Published: May 2022

In a market-oriented society, housing has become a commodity. One of the effects is a shortage of affordable housing. This chapter contrasts two broad approaches to the creation of (affordable) housing. The first is the conservative notion of a ‘property-owning democracy’. The second is publicly produced affordable housing in combination with tenant protection and rent control. We come down on the side of state-produced affordable housing as a more effective approach. The problem with the property-owning democracy is that it unravels in the implementation phase. By devolving the financing and construction of housing to a large array of actors, each operating according to the profit motive, the end result is a bias in favour of expensive owner-occupied housing and a shortage of secure and affordable rental properties. We conclude that housing does not need to, and should not, be commodified. People should not be forced to make large financial sacrifices that will keep the bank happy and themselves overworked and sleepless for years or even decades to come. Buying a home should not be a requirement for people who want affordable and stable housing.
Living in the Anthropocene
Authors: Wagenaar Hendrik , Prainsack Barbara
Published: May 2022

This chapter is organised around two narratives, a Grand and Modest Story, both equally important for fighting climate change. The Grand Story is the one we introduced in chapter 1: a dense network of economic, governmental, financial and individual practices prevents us from effectively countering global warming and its attendant effects. Collective intervention should address this interconnected configuration of social practices. The Modest Story is about how we understand our relation to the natural world. Here we argue against the currently popular ‘moonshot’ metaphor with its strong engineering implications. Instead, we should learn from indigenous knowing, which is relational, embodied, patient, and respectful of others, tradition and the natural environment. We capture this with the metaphor of gardening to guide collective action to counteract climate change. We point out some striking similarities between ways of indigenous knowing and pragmatist thinking. Building upon proposals for a Green New Deal, and bringing together the themes of this book, we chart a path towards the creation of an Ecological Society. An Ecological Society is based on renewable energy, clean air, water and soil, job creation and sustainable economic development, social protection, and public money.
Prisons of the world
Authors: Coyle Andrew
Published: May 2022

This chapter begins by linking the author’s experience of studying the management of very high security prisoners in North America in the 1980s with his involvement over 30 years later in providing expert court evidence in both Canada and the United States on the current excessive use of solitary confinement in these countries. These were examples of the many unresolved dilemmas which led him to a detailed academic study of the nature of imprisonment and from there to an intimate knowledge of the use of imprisonment around the world. From his earliest days as a junior prison governor he had felt a personal need to place the prison system and the whole notion of imprisonment within a wider context in order to explain the many obvious inconsistencies in how prisons operate and the uncertainties about their purpose.
Sub-Saharan Africa: an expensive colonial legacy
Authors: Coyle Andrew
Published: May 2022

Many prison systems in sub Saharan Africa are products of their colonial legacy with men and women housed in insanitary, crumbling buildings which are often little changed since the 19th century. This chapter provides examples from The Gambia and also Mozambique, where the author delivered a lecture to 300 prison officer recruits sitting on the ground in the open air under a group of great baobab trees. The chapter also describes the traumatic changes in South African prisons in the immediate aftermath of the apartheid era and what the author discovered when he was invited, in company with the Commissioner of Prisons for Uganda, to advise on the process of change which was needed to move the prison service from an apartheid to a multicultural model and how in the course of the visit he met the first black prison commissioner, a former schoolmaster from Soweto.
A ‘general crisis’?
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: May 2022

This chapter claims that mass higher education is experiencing a ‘general crisis’ which arose because its undoubted achievements in reshaping the individual, society, economy, and culture do not seem to have been properly recognised. Mass higher education has clearly played an especially powerful part in the revolution in gender roles, which has been perhaps the most decisive social change of the past half-century. An ever-increasing influx of graduates has reshaped the labour market. The expanding higher education system has staffed the welfare state and public sector, as well as the expanding corporate bureaucracies and technical workforces within the private sector. The chapter looks first at those achievements, then attempts to identify some of the reasons for the apparent failure adequately to acknowledge them, and ends with a discussion of whether mass higher education is better described as an incomplete revolution or a revolution betrayed or denied.
The development of mass higher education
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: May 2022

This chapter chronologically reviews the historical development of mass higher education in the UK since 1960. It offers a sketch of the broader development of the system rather than a detailed account of policymaking based on archives. The chapter divides the chronology into five periods: higher education around 1960; reform and growth headlined by the Robbins Report and modified by the binary policy during the 1960s; advances but also setbacks between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s; the emergence of an unambiguously mass system in the 1990s and 2000s, accompanied by a contested process of ‘modernisation’; and the period since 2010, with an attempted shift towards a higher education ‘market’. It also briefly sketches the developments outside the UK.
A further gaze
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: May 2022

This chapter uses a comparative gaze—looking beyond the UK—as it acknowledges that many of the characteristics of, as well as trends within and challenges to UK higher education are shared with many other higher education systems. The chapter is divided into three main sections: first, the shape and trajectories of global higher education are considered. Mass higher education, after all, is a global phenomenon, active in every country and on every continent. The second section focuses on the process of internationalisation in its various aspects: flows of ideas, of staff, of students and of reputation. The third, and longest section discusses in more detail three world regions: Europe; North America, in particular the US; and East Asia, the home of so-called ‘Confucian’ higher education systems.
COVID-19 emergency and market experiment
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: May 2022

This chapter focuses on issues familiar to higher education leaders, policymakers, researchers, and commentators. Among these are the implications of the public health emergency posed by the COVID-19 pandemic on the future direction of higher education. Across the world, most universities largely closed during the first wave, remaining open only for stranded students in campus residences and a few others, and some core services. Student learning moved online, as did the elaborate administrative and deliberative bureaucracy that is an inescapable feature of modern university life. The chapter also looks at the attempted development of a strongly market-oriented system of higher education in England, an experiment of more than local significance because it speaks to the wider question of whether there are limits to the application of market principles to the organisation of higher education.
Coda
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: May 2022

This chapter acknowledges that mass higher education is a work in progress. It holds that higher education faces a general crisis that goes beyond the perennial challenges of financial sustainability, adjusting to new learning paradigms and new patterns of knowledge production, evolving new models of organisation and so on, and even beyond more immediate and urgent challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and global warming. The chapter lays down the three possible responses to this general crisis, one of which is taking a radical leap forward. It underscores that the historic link between higher education and elites must be finally broken, and that tertiary education should be available to all. Higher education must be re-centred as a progressive project.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
Authors: FitzGibbon Ali
Published: May 2022

All research is an act of decision-making that must be navigated: how do we decide to do research or not in a time of, or in response to, an external crisis? Considering research in contemporary arts practices, the chapter challenges the researcher to consider whether action is better than inaction; speed better than contemplation; and to what end and for whose purpose she pursues research. Challenged to ‘do less, better’, but at a loss for how to proceed, the chapter presents a reflexive questioning strategy built around time, purpose and legitimacy for research decision-making, to enable the researcher to sift through perceived usefulness, conflicting needs and demands, actual beneficiary impact or the notional ‘impact’ pursued by the neoliberal academy.
Qualitative data re-use and secondary analysis: researching in and about a crisis
Authors: Tarrant Kahryn
Published: May 2022

While there has been significant innovation in methods of qualitative data re-use and qualitative secondary analysis (QSA), these have not traditionally been considered as part of the ‘go to’ methodological repertoire for qualitative research. The COVID-19 pandemic saw a proliferation of work on digital research methods and resources for research. This chapter promotes methods of qualitative data reuse and seeks to mitigate their under-use, particularly since lockdowns and social distancing continue to complicate, and even confound, face-to-face fieldwork. Given the need to understand evolving and uneven impacts of crises and their social contexts, the authors argue that qualitative data preservation and re-use entails a more nuanced ethical sensibility and make a case for improved data preservation and archiving.
Building relationships and praxis despite persistent obstacles
Authors: Imperiale Maria Grazia
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses how participatory methodologies (specifically, a critical participatory action research cycle involving planning, action, observation, and reflection) were developed in an online research project on critical English language education in a context of protracted crisis, in the Gaza Strip (Palestine). The impediments to research imposed by the COVID-19 global pandemic are nothing new to the Gaza Strip, which has been under blockade since 2007, impacting Gazans’ mental and physical wellbeing, affecting Gazan academics participation in international networks and collaborative partnerships and obstructing the flow of knowledge, books and teaching materials. Critical, creative and localised pedagogies enabled UK-based researchers and pre-service, secondary school English teachers based in the Gaza Strip to jointly develop, trial and evaluate teaching materials and lesson plans.
Disciplining the Poor: Welfare Conditionality, Labour Market Activation and Welfare ‘Fraud’
Authors: Kiely Elizabeth , Swirak Katharina
Published: May 2022

Chapter three focuses on projects of welfare reform, which have gained momentum over the last few decades in different country contexts. This chapter shows how unemployment and poverty are primarily constructed as ‘lifestyle’ problems, to be addressed through employment incentives and the ‘disciplinary turn’ in activation. The chapter takes note that at the same time as projects of welfare reform have gained momentum, governments have concentrated their attention on detecting and clamping down on benefit fraud as a means of identifying the ‘undeserving’ and stoking anti-welfarism. The longstanding history of criminalising the poor is acknowledged, but the particular shape this is taking in recent years across different social and cultural spheres is given consideration.  With a focus on recent positive developments in Scotland, the case for a new welfare imaginary is asserted.
Criminalising Homelessness and Poverty through Urban Policy
Authors: Kiely Elizabeth , Swirak Katharina
Published: May 2022

Chapter five is concerned with how the management and criminalisation of perceived ‘problem populations’ has intensified across contemporary cities and is achieved through an increasing array of different exclusionary legal mechanisms, interventions and technologies of urban policy. The consequences are that spatial and urban policies become imbued, transformed and subsumed by priorities of crime control and disorder prevention. Attention is given to how strategies of gentrification and privatisation and regulation of public spaces have sweeping impacts for poorer urban and homeless populations. It is also shown how crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) and the deployment of hostile architecture signify the securitization of urban policy agendas. The chapter points to the problematic relationship between homelessness and softer policing practices, which results in distinctively new forms of surveillance and ‘coercive care’ of homeless populations. It is argued that urban renewal strategies and public investments particularly targeted at territorially stigmatised areas, can be interpreted as governance strategies, which do little to address structural problems which manifest in unequal societies. It is proposed that housing models based on rights-based frameworks and cooperative principles can offer viable alternatives to conditional models of housing.
Criminalising Justice-Involved Persons through Rehabilitation and Reintegration Policies
Authors: Kiely Elizabeth , Swirak Katharina
Published: May 2022

Chapter seven directs attention to the separate processes and contexts at play that shape how rehabilitation and reintegration of justice-involved persons play out in contemporary times. It is argued that the failure to live up to expressively middle-class norms can systematically exclude those in need of reintegration supports from successful access to much needed supports and, therefore, directly contribute to criminalisation. Attention is given to how the provision of reintegration and rehabilitation services for justice-involved persons is strongly determined by the broader political economies in which they are situated. In particular, how neoliberal political economies and penal regimes interlink with the shape of reintegration policies and services are highlighted. It is also proffered that the neoliberal forces universally at play have shaped and permutated the 'ideal' subject of rehabilitation and reintegration at a deeper level. Demands of self-activation and entrepreneurship of the self unduly responsibilise justice-involved persons as if they were entirely in charge of their rehabilitative journeys, potentially criminalising them further along the way. This chapter is concluded by making the case for a more extensive reimagining of punishment, crime, subjectivity, and as a consequence, reintegration.
Women in Political News: Representation and Marginalization
Authors: Harmer Emily
Published: May 2022

This chapter explains the books objectives: firstly, to present a systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of the mediated portrayal of women in UK election coverage over a one-hundred-year period. Secondly, to argue that to avoid providing a partial account of changes in election coverage over time, scholars need to account for gendered biases and differences in reporting. The chapter sets out how political representation and mediated representations are connected. It then discusses how women have been politically marginalised in institutions and the media. The chapter then explains why studying gender is important to understand the development of election news. The chapter also includes methodological details of the empirical research ends with a brief overview of the different chapters.
Lessons from a Century of Reporting on Women in Elections
Authors: Harmer Emily
Published: May 2022

This final chapter brings together the results from the analysis of the mediated representation of women in UK election coverage. The chapter compares the mediated representation of all four groups of women, explaining the similarities and differences between them, to show the implications of gendered mediation for women in politics. The chapter then revisit the academic literature on changes to election coverage to demonstrate that taking gendered mediation into account is crucial for our understanding of these trends. The chapter also calls for more scholars of election coverage to engage with the literature on gendered mediation.