bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Racial Minorities and Crime
Authors: Ganapathy Narayanan
Published: October 2024

This chapter delves into the issue of racial disparities within the criminal justice system, using comparative literature to set the stage for introducing the neocolonialism framework. This framework aims to address the core question of how and why historical factors, such as colonization and multiracialism, have inadvertently hindered the life opportunities of certain Malays in post-independent Singapore. These factors have contributed to their inclination to resort to violence as a means of asserting alternative status. The chapter also seeks to explain why some working-class Malay males, who face similar exclusion and marginalization to other racial and class groups, exhibit a form of ‘racialized masculinity’. This racialized masculinity is a contextual performance that combines elements of both ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Malayness’. By adopting various identity postures, these individuals aim to negotiate power dynamics and position themselves in relation to both other Malays and the ethnic Chinese majority. Their ultimate objective is to successfully participate in the illegitimate society by organizing themselves into gangs. To provide a comprehensive explanation for the relationship between race, masculinity, and gang violence, the chapter integrates three interconnected discourses: neocolonial criminology, hegemonic masculinity and racialized masculinity.
The Omega Wave: The ‘Triadization’ of Omega
Authors: Ganapathy Narayanan
Published: October 2024

This chapter delves into the paradoxical nature of the hybridized racialized masculinity embraced by members of the Omega gang. While the preceding chapter highlighted how Omega members adopt a ‘protest’ stance to challenge what they perceive as ‘Chinese hegemonic masculinity’ rooted in economic dominance, this chapter explores how they, in turn, embody aspects of ‘Chineseness’ to undermine Chinese domination within the criminal underworld. In other words, Omega members emulate certain aspects of Chinese culture and behaviour. This chapter showcases how the appropriation of a goal purportedly associated with Chineseness – monetary success – has yielded significant benefits for the Omega gang, both in terms of human capital and financial gains. The gang’s ability to assimilate this organizational goal has contributed to its success and advancement in the criminal realm. Furthermore, this chapter offers a detailed and comprehensive portrayal of the everyday experiences and lives of Omega gang members as they engage in various gang activities. Through a thick description, it provides a nuanced understanding of their behaviours, motivations and interactions within the gang context.
Conclusion
Authors: Beck Vanessa , Brewis Jo
Published: October 2024

In this short editorial conclusion, we draw out the key messages offered throughout the volume’s chapters, highlighting areas where these chapters complement each other and/or make contributions to the knowledge base on menopause transitions and the workplace. This foundation is then used to re-assess areas that require further development, or which have opened up as new research areas given the now expanded knowledge base. This culminates in a clear research agenda to follow going forwards as we hope to see menopause transitions in the workplace becoming a more established research field. Our edited volume has brought together chapters covering menopause as a biopsychosocial process; transitions within workplaces; flexible working; trade unions, the spatial context of work; and male allyship in organizations. With this breadth of subject matter, we have made clear contributions and advanced knowledge on menopause in the following, important ways. First, the chapters have helped counter the still predominantly biomedical discourse around menopause and have furthered the discussions around a biopsychosocial approach. Karen Throsby and Celia Roberts do this most prominently in Chapter 2, and set the tone for the whole volume thereby. As their analysis makes clear, although the provision of HRT is an important subject and the focus on the availability of such medication in UK parliamentary activities is welcome (All-Party Parliamentary Group on Menopause, 2022; Women and Equalities Committee, 2022), there is a need for an extension of support for menopausal women to consider social and cultural factors. We also need, as Karen and Celia establish, to open up the conversation around menopause to include those who are often excluded – LGBTQI+ people, people with disabilities, people who do not have children and those who go through premature menopause – in workplaces and elsewhere.
“That’s Not Punk!” Authenticity, Older Punk Women, and the ‘Doing’ of Punk Scholarship
Authors: Way Laura
Published: October 2024

This chapter deals with two interrelated issues. First, drawing upon a feminist, inductivist methodology, the chapter will bring to the fore the previously marginalized voices of older/ageing punk women, focusing on how they construct and negotiate punk authenticity and demonstrating how their conceptualization of punk is shaped, and indeed sometimes constrained, by intersecting issues concerning gender and ageing; something previous work on ageing punk participants (for example, Bennett, 2006) has as yet failed to consider. Second, this chapter considers the ways the fabrication of authenticity is woven throughout the actual ‘doing’ of punk scholarship itself. Despite increasing moves to engage in reflexivity within the social sciences (and in, specifically, subcultures research), such embracing of reflexivity has certainly not been taken up at large among punk scholarship; often limited to those scholars reflecting on their ‘insider’ position and/or those focused on marginalized identities within punk and/or those adopting a feminist framework. A consideration of the construction of authenticity is vital within punk scholarship, particularly when thinking about what becomes considered as empirical, methodological, and theoretical canon.
Approaching, Contextualizing, and Embodying Interpretive Practice in Subcultural Studies
Authors: Williams J. Patrick , Judah Samuel
Published: October 2024

This chapter offers a summary and comparison of how scholars approach, contextualize, and embody interpretive practice in contemporary subcultural studies. It first situates the contributions to the volume, noting that they focus predominantly on alternative music and/or youth subcultures. Second, it compares the contributions to the broader literature on subcultures by analyzing a sample of ten publications from 2018 to 2022 that utilize the subculture concept from a variety of disciplines including business and consumer studies, literature and film studies, linguistics, criminology, psychology, sociology, and cultural studies. The chapter organizes the comparison in terms of how contributors and the sampled publications approach, contextualize, and embody interpretive practice, noting overlaps, cleavages, and gaps. It concludes by suggesting how globalization has affected the diffusion, but not the defusion, of the subculture concept as it continues to provide important analytical insight into a plethora of cultural phenomena beyond alternative youth and music cultures.
Alienation and Wellbeing
Authors: Yuill Chris
Published: October 2024

Alienation theory has received scant attention within the sociology of health as a theoretical explanation of health and wellbeing inequalities. I make the case for why alienation theory adds to sociological understandings of health and wellbeing in this book. I propose a novel reworking of alienation theory that centres the multiple relations between people, their societies, their bodies, their emotions, their health and wellbeing. A set of relations that is affected and shaped by life in capitalist society, a social and economic form that ultimately acts against wellbeing.Wellbeing plays a central role in my argument. I state that alienation is experienced as a detriment to overall physical and emotional wellbeing. Drawing on recent research in the sociology of health, I discuss how people as embodied social beings exist in a series of dialectical economic, social, biological and material relations. If one element of that set of relations overwhelms the other relations, this can lead to emotional and physical harms. By focusing on alienation and wellbeing I provide a concrete understanding of alienation as a lived experience of pain and suffering.
What Is Alienation?
Authors: Yuill Chris
Published: October 2024

Alienation theory promises a great deal in terms of understanding wellbeing. It is a theory that seeks to explain the relationships between wider social and economic relations and human emotions, bodies, desires, potentialities and abilities, between subjective experiences and objective conditions. The alienation theory referred to here is the one developed by Marx. In his writings on capitalism, both in what are referred to as the young and mature Marx, a concern is present with how capitalism damages people, creates social and individual suffering, while limiting the potential and capabilities of people. Linkages in the theory between bodies, labour, production, emotions, minds, brains and all forms of material things can become visible and allow insights into how and why people suffer, and, moving into normative territory, why that suffering is unnecessary.
Responding to Criticisms of Alienation Theory
Authors: Yuill Chris
Published: October 2024

A great deal of time has elapsed since Marx first laid down his ideas on alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1844. A considerable volume of scholarship, theorization and empirical work on Marx and alienation has occurred since then, alongside various waves of theories and other work within the social sciences. Different theories and philosophies have raised interesting and challenging questions for how Marx understood alienation. Post-structuralism and post-modernism have posed questions as to what it is to be human. In those philosophies (and I am speaking very broadly here) any reference to some form of essence, a human nature, was eschewed for a fluid relative subjectivity that emerges from discourses and technologies of power. Anything that hints of some form of fixity or essence is automatically deigned to be faulty. The accusation of essentialism can be levelled against alienation theory, and, given the prominence I placed on human nature in Chapter 1, that charge requires a response. More recently, post-humanism and neo-materialism have queried the relationship between humans and nature, alongside the modernist impulse to privilege and centre humans (and a White, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-male human at that) in understanding societies or environmental change. Those perspectives have sought to reorientate nature, from a passive, inert entity that does nothing without human input to one that possess its own agential potentials. Those are good points and again require a response.
Alienation and Wellbeing
Authors: Yuill Chris
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores how alienation affects wellbeing, how it gets under the skin, and how Marxism understands wellbeing. It draws on the previous chapters, moving towards an understanding of wellbeing grounded in a Marxist materialism. In doing so, critiques are made of other wellbeing theories alongside an attempt to understand the dialectical relationships between wellbeing, humans, their emotions and their bodies.
Beyond Alienation?
Authors: Yuill Chris
Published: October 2024

In the preceding chapters I have outlined that alienation exerts a toll on wellbeing and health. Human lives are stunted and damaged and, stepping into a more normative register, they are not what they could be. The capacities and capabilities that social agents possess lack the freedom to be fully actualized, and when those capacities and capabilities are enacted, it is within a set of estranged relations for the purposes of capitalist accumulation. So, what can we do? What can we do to move to a social formation where this does not occur, where social agents can realize and enact their potential? This chapter seeks to answer those questions, offering some ways forward but also recognizing the enormous challenges that exist.
Doreen Massey: For Political Praxis, Relationality and Contingency
Authors: Taylor Faith MacNeil
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores Doreen Massey’s theorization of space as relationally constituted as a facet of her praxis-driven commitment to the liberatory potential of economic geography. The chapter outlines the genealogy and diverse application of Massey’s approach to relationality, through focusing on four areas of her scholarship: (1) her critique of industrial locations theory, (2) her work on gendered spatial divisions of labour, (3) her analysis of capitalist landownership and (4) her advancement of ‘power-geometries’ as a critique of globalization theories. I argue that these four dimensions demonstrate Massey’s overarching commitment to making the political and social relationality of space legible. In the second section of the chapter, I outline some of the ways Massey’s intellectual and political advancements infuse and strengthen feminist political economy’s application within economic geography, emphasizing, in particular, contemporary shifts towards a ‘praxis’-focused approach to economic ‘conjuncture’.
Jessie Poon: International Trade and Geographies of Finance
Authors: Lai Karen P.Y.
Published: October 2024

Jessie Poon is a pioneering economic geographer whose early research into international trade and regional agreements in Asia plays a vital role in shaping economic geography research on Asia during a period of rapid economic expansion in the 1990s and early 2000s. Her research on trade, foreign direct investment, transnational corporations and Asia’s innovation and technological shifts has contributed to key debates on state–firm relationships, capital markets development, innovation and regional development for almost three decades. The influence of her work has been felt beyond economic geography in diverse fields such urban studies, international political economy, economics and development. Other than international trade and the organizational geographies of transnational corporations, a major strand of Poon’s research focuses on geographies of finance, particularly on the governance of capital markets, Islamic finance and offshore jurisdictions. Her work unpacks the complex ways in which new forms of financial and legal spaces are carved out and legitimized for Islamic finance and special purpose vehicles in offshore jurisdictions. These have important implications for how we study new forms and spatialities of knowledge production and regulatory power in economic geography as well as for legal geography, geopolitics and postcolonial debates. Drawing from her quantitative training and experience, Poon has also made substantive contributions to key debates on the changing roles and potential of quantitative methods in geography.
Housing Struggles: Dwelling in Crisis Economies
Authors: Ferreri Mara
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses the impact of two global crises, the 2008 financial crash and the COVID-19 pandemic, on contemporary economic geographies, with a particular focus on housing precarity and political struggles. It positions practices of dwelling in crisis at the analytical centre of critical and feminist understandings of ‘the economy’ and its contemporary geographies. Across a formal–informal continuum, it argues that dwelling practices are key to examining and addressing not only processes of extraction, control and dispossession, but also forms of resistance, interdependency and reconfiguration. The chapter anchors this argument in concrete examples: informal urban livelihoods and self-organized care through squatting, and extension of platform economies and digital mediation, in two European cities.
Migration and Cross-Border Trading
Authors: Wrigley-Asante Charlotte , Zaami Mariama
Published: October 2024

While research in migration has traditionally focused on males, there has been increasing research on females in both the Global North and Global South by feminist economic geographers. This is as a result of the increasingly feminized nature of the migration process as well as the increased opportunities in urban areas. In all of these, the focus has been on how migrant women were recruited and absorbed into the migration systems resulting in the feminization of global social reproduction and care work, but there have been limited connections between gender, migration and cross-border trading in economic geographical research. This chapter discusses feminist geographers’ contributions to migration research in Africa by highlighting the linkages between gender, migration and cross-border trading. The chapter discusses the trajectory of gender and migration research in the Global South where emphasis has been placed on the relationship between migration and household poverty with less focus on the nexus between migration and cross-border trading. Using the case of Ghana, the chapter highlights the opportunities, challenges and vulnerabilities of women in cross-border trading while drawing the attention of economic geographers to the remaining gaps for future research.
Arrival
Authors: Willim Robert
Published: October 2024

Introduction to Mundania and mundanisation, and how this relates to the domestication concept. Explanation of the probing method, and the range and scope of the book. Chapter keywords
Beyond
Authors: Willim Robert
Published: October 2024

In Mundania, much of what we are connected to is somewhere else. Beyond. Elsewhereness has become a normal condition of everyday life with network technologies (Willim 2013b). Occurrences elsewhere have concrete repercussions in our immediate surroundings, and they also influence how we think about such phenomena as places, location and addresses. Systems and devices spread out across the planet influence at a distance and can also be influenced from a distance. Instantly. The assemblages of Mundania stretch out geographically and through imagination.
Order
Authors: Willim Robert
Published: October 2024

What role does order play in Mundania? When is this property challenged? Everyday life is where technologies withdraw. Infrastructures and the concealment of complexity are enmeshed in the dynamics of the commonplace, in the interplay between order and disorder. Also, uncanny circumstances are veiled below ordered structures and grids, and through often numbing procedures. Sometimes order is challenged.
Variability
Authors: Willim Robert
Published: October 2024

At a closer look, Mundania is constantly re-created. Order is, as we have seen, merely temporarily and situationally fixed. Mundania is like an image on a computer screen that seems to be static, but beneath and beyond the glass surface of the screen there is a constant flow of energy, processes and invisible work upholding what is experienced as a motionless image. Mundania keeps on emerging as people experience it. What is experienced as ordinary and what is experienced as inertia or transformation is contextual. The different experiences of change, interferences and suspensions are furthermore unevenly distributed. There is variability and mutability in Mundania. Conditions might change and differ between time and context. Shifting tempi, temporalities and horizons of possibility for different people. This variability is related to social processes and stratifications, and to the ways imaginaries unfold. What is possible, how does variability emerge and how is it maintained? The here and now of Mundania is influenced by projections into different times and possibilities, by expectations of what could come and what is remembered.
Introduction
Authors: Britton Joanne
Published: October 2024

The introduction presents the overall rationale for the book, explaining how it provides a comprehensive framework for contributing knowledge about the social and cultural organization of Muslim family life. It provides readers with an understanding of what is distinctive about Muslim families and what they have in common. In doing so, it critically engages with the identity category ‘Muslim’ and considers the centrality of the family in Islam. It draws attention to the diversity and complexity of Muslim family life, including the assumed norm of extended family formations. The introduction concludes with a summary of the book’s structure, providing a brief outline of each chapter that follows.
Theorizing Muslim Family Life
Authors: Britton Joanne
Published: October 2024

Chapter 2 engages with major debates in family and relationships studies to set out the book’s core theoretical and conceptual framework. Drawing on Orientalist and decolonizing arguments, it explains how Muslim family life has been marginalized in both traditional and current theories of family. It identifies extended family formations as a privileged marker of difference for Muslim families which operates to position Muslims as problematic. The chapter considers how the conceptual orientation of family practices and personal life offers some valuable tools with which to explore Muslim family life. The chapter also explains why the conceptual and analytical lens of the family cannot be straightforwardly discarded when examining Muslim family life.
Changing Perspectives: Muslim Families as ‘a Problem’
Authors: Britton Joanne
Published: October 2024

The chapter adopts a historical perspective to investigate changing perspectives of Muslim families. It begins by considering the significance of colonialism and empire and related post-Second World War patterns of migration. Moving on to the mid- to late 20th century, the chapter considers how Muslim family life increasingly attracted unfavourable attention due to criticisms of the political project of multiculturalism and emerging connected arguments about cultural and religious incompatibility. It explores how the changing politics of identity led to enhanced, discriminatory interest in the private domain of Muslim family life. The final section identifies two related processes of representation which work to position Muslim families as a problem to be addressed.
Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination
Authors: Britton Joanne
Published: October 2024

This chapter addresses inequality, disadvantage and discrimination, showing how race, ethnicity and religion, as well as other intersections, impact on Muslim family life. It identifies prominent perspectives of Muslim family life in the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing how sympathetic accounts of Muslim families co-existed with familiar problematizing ones. It presents evidence illustrating how the pandemic affected Muslim families by interacting with and exacerbating existing inequalities. The chapter explains the ways in which a relational approach is useful in understanding Muslim family life in conditions of poverty. This includes how adopting a family perspective on poverty encourages exploration of distinctive characteristics, not least the complexities and relevance of a collectivist orientation to family life.
Iconographic Ambiguities
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

To comprehend dissection photography as an evolving genre, we must first and foremost stop looking at the genre’s raw elements, the typology of the dissecting room, as the sole means of grouping and thus defining dissection photography in total. While this structure is decidedly more palatable to a broad, non-medically inclined audience, it fails to position or contextualize these subjects and their influences from a technical or sociocultural standpoint. To illustrate this point, this chapter discusses grave robbing, and its relation to the origins of dissection photographs, and how systemic racism created a divergent iconography associated with Black student and physician identity. Particular attention is paid to medical schools in the American South and their attempts to prevent Black students from dissecting White bodies.
Conclusion: “Learning to Fight Death Next to Death Itself”
Authors: Zimmerman Brandon
Published: October 2024

The book’s conclusion focuses on questions such as, why do we care about dead bodies and their photographic representations? It situates these questions within the era of the dissection photograph before discussing current views and trends in the modern American dissecting room. Specific attention is given to the author’s experiences observing students interacting with their cadavers, and how current trends in medical humanities seek to soften student–cadaver interactions through formal orientation seminars. Also discussed is how modern students view the role of the photograph. Particularly relevant to dissection photography is the question, if allowed, would the students of today take pictures with the dead? While most students aligned themselves with modern ethical standards, and the expressed policies of their school, this question and the author’s exploration sought to determine whether policy was in fact suppressing an underlying need; the same need students had almost a century and a half ago.
Workshop as Queer Feminist Praxis: Insights from Colombian Queer and Trans Women Organizing for Peace
Authors: Hagen Jamie J.
Published: October 2024

Queer and trans women continue to fall through the cracks in research about women and LGBTQ people’s, including in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Coalition building through workshops with feminists who have access to peace and security spaces can address this exclusion while centring queer and trans women’s experiences. A workshop applying a queer feminist methodology can include individuals often excluded from discussions about queer conflict research, even in WPS initiatives intended to prioritize the experiences of women. A Global South workshop led by queer and trans women foregrounds voices marginalized in peace and security space. In this chapter I first detail why it is necessary to include lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGTQ) women in peace and security practices as well as why the WPS agenda is a valuable entry point for this collaboration between feminist and LGBTQ communities. I then illustrate this queer feminist praxis through the example of a workshop in Bogotá, Colombia in 2022 facilitated by Colombia Diversa, and invited feminist peacebuilders and LBTQ women human rights defenders to discuss next steps in drafting Colombia’s first WPS National Action Plan.
Researching Queer Lives in the Shadow of North-East Nigeria’s Conflict
Authors: Nagarajan Chitra
Published: October 2024

During more than a decade of violence, civilians have faced gendered risks to their lives, property, and well-being as a result of conflict between the Nigerian state and armed opposition groups commonly referred to as Boko Haram. At the same time, human rights violations against people of non-normative sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions are rife across the country. Yet, despite an active humanitarian response which aims to prioritize protection, there is little research looking specifically at the experiences of queer people in conflict-affected north-east Nigeria. This chapter examines the ethical considerations surrounding a study aiming to deepen understanding and analysis of the realities, challenges, and resilience of queer people in this highly volatile and insecure context. It focuses on mechanisms the study put in place to: (1) address issues of power including through who controls the production and sharing of knowledge; (2) ensure proper safeguarding, safety, security, and well-being of participants, researchers, and the queer community at large; and (3) maximize benefit to queer people (participants and non-participants alike). It discusses ethical issues and challenges that arose and how the research team dealt with them.
“This Place Is a Bus Stop”: Temporalities of Zimbabwean Migrant Men Waiting at the Transit Shelter
Authors: Vanyoro Kudakwashe
Published: October 2024

Given the humanitarian situation discussed in the previous chapter, it may be easy to conclude that the everyday control of migrant bodies transforms them into Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare lives’. This chapter explores how disruptions shape the waiting modes of irregular Zimbabwean migrant men who have arrived in South Africa but are unable to travel further into the interior. The chapter argues, using Lauer’s (1981) temporal framework of social time, that while waiting is one aspect of regulating these migrants, it is also an aspect of them seeking agency in the Zimbabwe–South Africa border regime. This demonstrates how immobilities can be conceptualised in both time and space. In the chapter, the intersections of immobility and agency indicate that the relationship between resistance and control in waiting is ambiguous. This casts doubt on the idea of immobility as an experience that causes people in humanitarian camps to recognise the state of bare life.
Pastures New: Atmospheres, Mud, and Moods
Authors: Leslie Esther
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores current trends in digitization of bodies, focusing this in relation to humans and dairy cows, and the possibly common futures that await both. It considers how matter, in old and newly conceived forms, interacts with digitalized environments and to the point that it comes to be ‘born digital’. Key here is the question of what happens to the body – and by extension, selfhood – of the human or animal when exposed to reconditioning through an array of digital instruments that measure, command, control, mobilize, and, in various ways, activate in the world. Among these are smart devices, genetic analyses, VR glasses and applications, and so-called radical atoms.
Introduction – An Overview of the Book: Beyond Conventional Approaches to Disaster Recovery
Authors: Forino Giuseppe
Published: October 2024

Disaster recovery is always a challenging time for affected places. Places, people, environments and economies try to function and perform again, moving forward across rubble, dust, pain and death. Disaster recovery is therefore the process by which a system that has experienced a structural failure re-establishes a routine, organized, institutionalized mode of adaptation to its post-impact environment (Bates and Peacock, 1989). This emphasizes the reorganization of social life and the creation of a new, stable relationship between social and environmental features (Bates and Peacock, 1989). Therefore, disaster recovery is a complex process where different actors play a game, interact, conflict and discuss what, how, why to rebuild and recover. At a glance, disaster recovery is always a challenging time for affected places. Several common misconceptions, however, exist around the efforts for recovering places. One is that it is often stated that recovery efforts should be oriented towards bringing back the affected places and their social, political, institutional and organizational features at their ‘normal’ state, to regain an undefined normalcy (Rivera, 2020). But, we can argue, if that state of normalcy prior to the disaster was unable to avoid the occurrence of a disaster, this state of normalcy needs to be changed. Also, who and what define ‘normalcy’? Neoliberal societies such as the contemporary, globalized and hyperconnected ones consist of a complex set of actions, procedures, and flows interacting across scales, spaces and places. These can be highly dynamic and quickly change also into so-called remote places. Normalcy, therefore, hardly exists. Places changes, so do humans, so do environments.
Expertise Versus Aspiration: Ethnography of Post-disaster Reconstruction in Emilia
Authors: Pitzalis Silvia
Published: October 2024

From a socio-cultural perspective, disasters are social events that can be spatially and temporally analysed as the product of the interconnections between the impact of a physical event and a specific territorial, socio-cultural and economic-political context. Accordingly, detailed knowledge, policies, decisions, behaviours and practices can increase the impacts of physical events and make socially produced responses unsuccessful. Ethnographically exploring the post-disaster reconstruction phase provides a deeper understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics triggered by disasters within this context. This chapter analyses the socio-cultural dynamics produced in Emilia (Italy) after the earthquakes of 20 and 29 May 2012 as a response to the post-disaster management by the techno-bureaucratic apparatus. It investigates the different perspectives on the reconstruction conceived and implemented by national and local institutions. It also explores aspirations nourished by the desires of the affected population and the role of professionals (architects, engineers and surveyors) involved in loss and damage assessment for accessing reconstruction financial contributions. The chapter relies on in-depth ethnographic research (2012–18) and explores the meaning of post-disaster reconstruction, the knowledge and power relations created, and the discourses produced by different actors.
Telling Stories with Ribbons: Visual Acknowledgement in the Wake of Child Sexual Abuse
Authors: McDonald Dave
Published: October 2024

Cities are rich sites of storytelling. While widely established in relation to large global cities, this chapter investigates the material culture of a regional Australian city – the Victorian town of Ballarat. Widely remembered as the epicentre of Australia’s gold rush in the 1850s and the site of the famed Eureka rebellion, it has more recently become known as an epicentre of institutional child sexual abuse. In 2015 when the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse began hearing the testimony of Ballarat’s survivor community, locals responded by tying colourful ribbons to the fences of institutions in which such abuse had occurred. This response transformed into an enduring movement known as Loud Fence. This chapter examines how the visual aesthetics of Loud Fence serve to challenge the dominant institutional narrative of child sexual abuse (or denial thereof), and in doing so inscribes an alternative story in which collective mourning for victims is coaligned with institutional culpability and betrayal. In doing so, the chapter seeks to offer new ways of thinking about the relationship between visuality and narrative, and the role of memorialisation as an accompaniment to oral storytelling in the wake of institutional child sexual abuse.
Reading Back as a Way to Give Back? A Narrative Practice-Informed Method for Interview-Based Research
Authors: Strauven Sarah
Published: October 2024

This chapter offers a narrative practice-informed perspective on qualitative research with a special focus on its practical implications to engage with the ethics and politics of working with narratives. The gaze is turned on the process of research, as issues of representation, reciprocity and accountability animated the relational responsibilities of working alongside people with and without refugee backgrounds. Interviewing people who experience their stories being subjugated by dominant one-dimensional descriptions of their lives and personhood requires researchers to consider the constitutive power they have when eliciting stories. This chapter describes the two narrative practices, witnessing and deconstruction, that were put to work to reflect on methodological processes and pursue their alignment with relational ethics. Stepping into a ‘researcher-witness position’ touched on matters of representation and reciprocity and led to the crafting and reading back of resonant narratives of participants’ accounts. Subsequently deconstructing this method allowed the author to examine the effects that ‘reading back’ had on the identities and lives of interviewees, and by doing so, to stay accountable to them. This chapter argues that focus on the process of research enriches the co-production of knowledge, grounded in relational ethics, while providing innovative opportunities to ‘give back’ to participants.
Sound, Order and Survival in Prison
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

The first empirical study of sound in prison, this is an aural ethnography of a local men’s prison and life within, and beyond, the prison walls. Using sound as both a methodological lens and focus of enquiry, this is an exploration of the prison social world and what sound tells us about the basis for order. Listening to the soundscape reveals different textures of temporal and spatial experience. Order is a matter of co-governance, a ‘good day’ the starting point for diagnosing disruption to the rhythms and routines of the prison community.
Just Landed
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

This chapter takes the reader inside the prison soundscape, asking ‘Why sound?’ before introducing the methodology, the application of ‘auscultation’ and the particularities of the prison. It concludes with an overview of the rest of the book.
A Kettle, a Penguin and a Word Arrow
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

Examples are used to explore how boggling and contradictory rules are navigated in an attempt to keep on the right side of the prison. When is it acceptable to interfere? When is it necessary to break confidence? How can mistakes be managed in an environment which privileges security concerns above all else.
Time for a Global Infrastructure Turn
Authors: Addie Jean-Paul D. , Glass Michael R. , Nelles Jen , Marino Lauren
Published: October 2024

This chapter situates Infrastructural Times in relation to current debates in urban and infrastructure studies. It introduces the book’s central themes and discusses key temporal dimensions of urban infrastructure, including socio-technical systems’ impact on the urban experience, temporal fixes, infrastructural imaginaries, and temporalities of maintenance and repair. The chapter argues that centring time with the contemporary global ‘infrastructure turn’ enriches, extends, and challenges current work by posing critical questions in novel registers: disrupting neat teleological narratives; probing the relationship between radical and incremental transformation; interrogating moments of temporal disruption; exploring the unexpected pathways of technological and urban development; contextualizing infrastructures’ pasts; and asking what they signify about the future. It then introduces the chapters in the book and presents the key theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions made throughout the volume.
Advertising the Ancestors: Ghanaian Funeral Banners as Image Objects
Authors: Bredenbröker Isabel
Published: October 2024

In the south of Ghana, so-called funeral banners are ubiquitous in public space. These large-scale posters printed on PVC give the faces of deceased community members a continued place among the living as well as a distinctly ‘modern’ feel and aesthetic. By looking at the materiality and contexts of these image-objects, that are used as advertisements and props in multiple ways during funerals and beyond, this chapter unpacks the functions that funeral banners have for the living. It traces their social lives and the ways in which material and visual qualities of funeral banners help to produce morally good kinds of death or respond to bad death appropriately. Ethnographic data from contemporary Ghana is brought in dialogue with the enduring influences of colonial history and shifting power relations. These continue to shape the ways in which the dead can remain integral parts of communities. Funeral banners may indexically help to recreate the dead in a social process of making death, and they may help to turn bad kinds of death into better, possibly good kinds. While serving to attract visitors to funerals, they also offer semi-permanent sites in which the dead may come to acquire ancestor status.
Dying Apart, Buried Together: COVID-19, Cemeteries and Fears of Collective Burial
Authors: Holleran Samuel
Published: October 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic forced cemetery managers and local governments to draw up plans for ‘mass casualty’ events, including communal burial, a mode that has long existed for the indigent but is rarely acknowledged. Media coverage of mass burials brought existing ‘pauper grave’ sites to the fore and precipitated a conversation on the ‘proper’ interment of bodies. This chapter examines the history of collective burial and addresses how images of coffins, cooling trucks and overfull cemeteries have come to define moments of societal crisis. It is argued that the trench grave has become a stand-in for civic rupture and institutional failure, leading to the question: what makes the prospect of communal burial so appalling? Fears of collective burial are culturally bound with European funerary rites but, in countries like Japan, collective burial societies have gained in popularity. Moreover, ‘death disruptors’ in the United States and elsewhere have advocated for new, norm-challenging modes of co-interment. This chapter ends by analysing these technologies and their public reception. This contributes to a broader media ecology for the circulation of images of death, and an emergent ‘death positivity’ movement that challenges long-held customs in cemeteries and funeral industries.
Introduction
Authors: O'Brien Nick
Published: October 2024

Popular cinema and theatre, for example in the work of director Ken Loach and playwright Francesca Martinez, succeed in depicting the everyday tensions at street-level between citizen and state. Political theory and practice have been more reticent in making the connection between these everyday relationships and democratic citizenship. When such relationships break down and lead to the expression of citizen grievance, the institutions of administrative justice, such as ombuds, tribunals and civic mediators, seek to intervene. Their efforts are frequently hampered by a residual liberal legalism that emphasizes process and form at the expense of outcome and substance. Building on the emancipatory gains of liberalism, postliberalism promotes a philosophy of the common good that redresses the balance. Later chapters will explore in more detail the concepts of bureaucracy, liberal legalism, responsive legality and postliberalism; describe the development of tribunals and ombud institutions; consider the relevance of disability rights, especially in the context of the mental health and special educational needs and disability systems; and distil a broader vision of postliberal administrative justice based on the citizen-agency of street-level bureaucrats, the democratic culture of public authorities, the active participation of aggrieved citizens and the bridging capacity of administrative justice institutions.
The Promise of Postliberalism
Authors: O'Brien Nick
Published: October 2024

Postliberalism offers a means of escape from the constraints of liberal legalism. The common good, not individual rights, is its primary value, albeit a form of the common good that is consistent with democratic pluralism and resistant to the nostalgic seductions of common good constitutionalism. As an antidote to liberal legalism, postliberalism seeks to reinstate aspects of liberal thought that have become recessive, namely philosophical Idealism, political pluralism, civic humanism and political pragmatism. By doing so, it emphasizes the centrality of the positive and ethical state, of the individual as socially embedded in civil society, of virtuous disposition, dignity and character, and of problem-solving as the overarching purpose of response to citizen grievance. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government is presented as a cultural expression of responsive legality residing in the common good.
Thriving beyond Debt
Authors: Roche Zach
Published: October 2024

This book is about the lived experience of bankruptcy and the role that debt relief plays as a form of welfare protection from the perspective of economic sociology/theology. If you have ever wondered what it is like to go bankrupt, then this book will answer at least some of your questions. By using the lens of lived experience, we will see the process from start to finish through the eyes of people with mortgage debt – from the day they get the keys to their new house, to falling into distress, how they go about seeking advice, applying to go insolvent, and what happens in cases of both success and failure. The Irish situation is offered as a liberal market economy case study, with comparisons made to the UK and US contexts because these countries heavily influenced the recent Irish insolvency reforms of 2012. The book advances the need for new reforms of debt relief, and that because we have become so over-indebted that bankruptcy and insolvency must be seen as a form of welfare protection.
Introduction
Authors: Roche Zach
Published: October 2024

This chapter introduces the core arguments of the book, namely that in order to understand debt, we must understand debt relief, and in order to understand debt relief, we must see it from a moral perspective. Debt involves a whole array of non-economic relations, including trust, faith, sin and so on, which is examined throughout from the standpoint of economic theology. Using a lived experience qualitative approach, the book charts the journey of 18 Irish mortgage holders in debt distress as they attempt to recover and how they face the decision to go insolvent or bankrupt. This introduction establishes what debt relief is and how morality influences debtor decisions to seek debt relief, such as the tendency to rank their debts morally, rather than according to rational economic logic – for example, they often focusing on caring debts (money borrowed to support loved ones) over other kinds of debt (survival, leisure or status), even if this would be financially irrational. The Irish setting is offered as a case study of how these relations play out in liberal market economies such as the UK or the US.
The Uncertainties of Debt
Authors: Roche Zach
Published: October 2024

All borrowing begins with a utopian vision of the future, and people never imagine that they will be the ones in debt distress. This chapter charts how Berlant’s concept of ‘the good life’ has become culturally embedded in our vision of how to live well. This builds on the previous chapter by arguing that people borrow not only because they must, but also because they want to acquire symbolic trappings of ‘success’, such as a college degree or a house which provides upward social mobility. We meet our mortgage holders for the first time through a lived experience qualitative approach as they borrow to achieve these markers of success. However, they will each fall into distress for different reasons, and the chapter outlines three of these – relationship breakdown (divorce), unemployment, and rises in the cost of living – each of which is offered as a stronger explanation than the hegemonic belief in the laziness or recklessness of the debtor. The chapter concludes by outlining the symbolic gestures debtors make (for example, quitting smoking) when they are unable to make a true financial recovery. These gestures are offered to creditors as a sign that the debtor still cares and is doing their best to pay.
Power and Morality in Policy Making
Authors: Stevens Alex
Published: October 2024

This chapter provides the theoretical basis for the development of the policy constellations approach. It discusses the forms of power that affect policy making. These include political forms of power, like institutional, coercive and legal power. It also includes social forms of power, including economic, epistemic, affective, media and savvy social power. Approaches to morality are also discussed, including moral foundations theory and the theory of basic values. The chapter concludes that all policy is morality policy, driven by a combination of material and normative interests, generated by underlying social and cultural structures.