bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Thinking/acting with migrants under neoliberalism: “It’s horrible to perceive solidarity as merely absorbing the sorrow of one side”
Authors: Erdal Cihan
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores how young activists have developed their agency and intersubjectivity together with migrants in Istanbul since the 2010s. It elaborates an account of the work of ‘thinking actors’ from Hannah Arendt’s phenomenological conceptualisation of politics and citizenship. It offers a perspective on the prefigurative practices of young activists in Istanbul, from the Migrant Kitchen, Migrant Network Forums and Migrant Letters, illuminating how coming into a web of relations at a shared table with migrants generates and enhances the possibility of enacting radical democratic participation. By illustrating the emancipatory and egalitarian potentials within work to erase hierarchies and inequalities between activists and migrants, the chapter also invites us to reckon with the challenges that could impede coalition-building under neoliberalism.
Conceptualising community development through a pedagogy of convivência : youth, race and territory in Brazil
Authors: Fernandes Fernando Lannes , Rodriguez Andrea
Published: May 2023

The lives of young people living in Brazilian urban peripheries are crossed by the overlaps between territorial stigma, racism, poverty, social insecurity, involvement in illicit activities, contact with criminal justice and diverse experiences of violence and violation of human rights. This chapter reflects on the territorialised and racialised distinctions of rights they experience. It explores the monsterisation and disposability of young people, analysing how structural racism is reproduced by both institutional practices and practitioner attitudes towards them. The chapter examines the possibilities and limits of cultural knowledge translations, diverse socio-historical realities and contrasting policy-practice environments in the context of working with young people between Brazil and the UK. In doing so, it opens up potential lines of dialogue with academics and practitioners by introducing some critical concepts and approaches for community development through the lenses of a pedagogy of convivência/coexistence. The chapter highlights relevant principles as reminders for practice, advocacy, policy impact and, more widely, political incidence, that is, the ability of social agents to influence the political processes and policy agendas.
“I did not want the project to end. For me, it should last forever”: exploring a community development framework based on learned lessons from marginalised youth voices in Brazil
Authors: Rodriguez Andrea , Fernandes Fernando Lannes
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the Escape Routes project which aimed to develop approaches for working with marginalised young people involved in drug trafficking in Brazil. The project aimed to produce a better understanding of these young people’s life circumstances, and new methodologies of work to support them when making their way out of criminal networks. The chapter highlights the challenges of structural racism and discrimination to the design and implementation of more inclusive programmes, policies and practices. It argues the need to consider the role of community development and participatory methodologies to not only rethink the actions of government agencies, but also practitioners’ attitudes to create a bridge to a humanised practice. One of the key elements of that is the recognition of young people not as ‘objects’ of intervention, but as agents of their own future.
The political construction of upper secondary transitions: comparing problematisations and solutions in two urban contexts
Authors: Jacovkis Judith , Prieto Miriam , Rujas Javier
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the political construction of upper secondary educational transitions by comparing the problematisation of and the solutions proposed by policymakers and educational stakeholders in Barcelona and Madrid. By means of critical policy analysis and sociology of education policy, this chapter highlights the dynamic and conflicting nature of the upper secondary field and the frictions related to its functions, institutional organisation and different forms of provision. Results demonstrate the subordination of the vocational track to the academic one both in discursive and institutional terms. It also proves a strong problematisation of VET in terms of a naturalised conception of the labour market and the skills demand. Overall, the chapter demonstrates the political nature of educational transitions by highlighting the multiple inequalities that traverse the conception, organisation and provision of the upper secondary educational tracks and also the political and institutional mechanisms that legitimise them.
Upper secondary transitions and urban educational spaces: public representations of youth, choices and (im)mobilities
Authors: Tarabini Aina , Jacovkis Judith , Montes Alejandro
Published: May 2023

Combining research traditions on critical geography, school choice and segregation, this chapter inquires into how urban inequalities are related to both the supply and choice of upper secondary education. The objective of the chapter is to explore public representations of young people, mobility and spatiality in the making of upper secondary educational transitions. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the chapter unravels the role that policy actors attribute to the urban space in the explanation, legitimation and/or problematisation of upper secondary educational supply and upper secondary educational choices in Barcelona. The results identify two discursive poles – the critical and the compliant – that conceptualise the relationship between youth, educational transitions and urban spaces in disparate ways. Overall, the chapter helps to challenge the normative, homogeneous and individualising narratives regarding educational choices and transitions and to reinforce the spatial thinking around young people’s identities, choices and lives.
Reconstructing learner identity in upper secondary vocational education: from disaffection to recognition
Authors: Tarabini Aina , Jacovkis Judith , Curran Marta
Published: May 2023

This chapter inquires into the notion of learner identity by exploring how it is shaped and reconstructed within upper secondary vocational settings. Based on in-depth interviews with Vocational Education and Training (VET) students in Barcelona, the analysis shows that most of them have based their upper secondary choice upon a highly damaged identity as ‘proper’ learners. This identity, however, is challenged under particular institutional and relational conditions and can be modified over time. The learning cultures of VET, and particularly their pedagogical and curricular ethos, are highlighted by young people as critical in re-signifying their identities as learners. Of special importance is the recognition of practical knowledge, allowing students to revise their own notions of ability, capability and self. Overall, the chapter contributes to advancing the sociological study of learner identities and their critical role in producing and understanding educational choices and transitions.
Opportunity
Authors: Gal John , Weiss-Gal Idit
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the specific institutions in which policy is formulated and the impact that these can have on efforts by social workers to affect social policy. The goal of the chapter is to shed light on the place of institutional opportunities in shaping levels and forms of policy engagement by social workers. The notion of opportunity structures is employed as a conceptual foundation for a better understanding of the relevance of the policy environment for the policy engagement of social workers. In addition, the neo-institutional literature, which underscores the role of norms and rules in determining the policy process, is employed as a way to think about the access of social workers to policy processes. The chapter relates to the national and local levels of policy engagement by social workers, and draws upon examples from various countries to illustrate the ways in which the form of social workers’ involvement reflects institutional facets and opportunity structures in different national contexts.
Explaining the policy engagement of social workers and beyond
Authors: Gal John , Weiss-Gal Idit
Published: May 2023

The concluding chapter pulls together the different components of the policy engagement conceptual framework. It makes the claim that an understanding of efforts by social workers to impact social policy requires us to move beyond individual factors and to look at the interplay between the context in which these take place, the nature of the policy process and diverse motivational factors. In doing so, the policy engagement conceptual framework extends the boundaries of current thinking about the policy engagement of social workers. Drawing on these insights, we discuss the implications of this for social work education, practice and research.
So what is a ‘university’? Part 2: Students, parents and other constituencies
Authors: Thrift Nigel
Published: May 2023

This chapter continues from Chapter 2 in surveying the different constituencies that go to make up a university, concentrating on students, parents, council and alumni. There is a substantial digression on freedom of speech.
The hardy perennials
Authors: Thrift Nigel
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers issues that never go away, namely the balance of public and private funding, student access, tuition fees, research funding, research integrity, pensions, league tables, and autonomy (or the lack of it). The chapter concludes by describing the high degree of dissatisfaction that can now be found in and with many British research universities, and I try to answer the question of why this dissatisfaction has grown to quite the degree it has.
The Australianisation of British higher education
Authors: Thrift Nigel
Published: May 2023

This chapter argues that a much better explanation of recent developments in research universities than marketisation is provided by the intersection of a series of three processes: financialisation, nationalisation, and student number growth arising out of a model of higher education which might be considered Australian in character in its concentration on size and institutional similarity. The chapter ends with an examination of the problematic leadership of the sector and the likelihood of a financial crisis.
Redesigning the research university
Authors: Thrift Nigel
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers a number of system, teaching and research policies that might begin to boost research universities chances of doing excellent research that can establish a future for the planet such as national universities, enhanced cooperation, a pared-back residential model, and boosting institutional capacity through research centres. These are based on greater cooperation and more coherent and focussed leadership and a greater emphasis on design.
Bouncing back: the employment of sector attributes to recover from crises
Authors: Chapman Tony
Published: May 2023

The resilience and longevity of voluntary sector organisations (VSOs), compared with their private sector counterparts, derives from a different relationship with money. Most VSOs are small and they rely more on people’s freely given time than cash. Larger organisations rely more on finance, but with a mix of given and earned income together with volunteer and in-kind support. This is why most VSOs are more able to flex to circumstance than private businesses, where decisions about closure are more immediate. With these differences in mind, this chapter examines the impact of COVID-19 as a major social and economic shock to the voluntary sector. Using Third Sector Trends, longitudinal evidence and NCVO time series data, two crises are compared: the 2020–21 COVID-19 pandemic and the global financial crisis of 2008–10. The findings show how the sector’s agile and opportunistic attributes helped recovery from the first crisis and how the sector will, like as not, bounce back after the pandemic subsides.
Paying the price of ‘doing good’ in the face of crisis
Authors: Smith Sarah , Coule Tracey M. , King Daniel
Published: May 2023

The global COVID-19 pandemic is ‘double-trouble’ for many voluntary sector organisations (VSOs) simultaneously subject to higher demand for services, alongside a decrease in the money available to fund their work. This has prompted scholarship examining the immediate adverse, and often economic, impact of the crisis on VSOs, and the positive benefits achieved for external constituents through their ‘good’ work. Findings from an 18-month UKRI-funded project into COVID-19 and VSOs show some of the human costs of ‘doing good’ in crisis contexts. This chapter explores the propensity for the wellbeing of staff and volunteers to be sacrificed and delineates the various features of voluntary sector work that may lead to this condition. We argue for scholars and practitioners to resist framing their analysis of COVID-19 and VSOs only in terms of the impacts on organisations at the expense of seeing what is going on inside organisations to achieve such social goods.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on advocacy work of voluntary sector organisations in Wales
Authors: Bailey Elizabeth Cookingham , Sarter E. Katharina , Terry Vita
Published: May 2023

Since the founding of the welfare state, there has been considerable debate concerning the balance between advocacy and service delivery functions of voluntary sector organisations (VSOs). The COVID-19 pandemic, once again, raises the question of the relationship between the advocacy and service delivery function of VSOs and the argument that advocacy is being crowded out by service delivery. This is particularly important in small VSOs and community-based organisations reliant on funding from service delivery. This chapter explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the advocacy functions of voluntary sector organisations across England, Scotland and Wales. It draws on two projects: the Institute for Voluntary Action Research on the advocacy work of small charities in England, and the University of South Wales research comparing Scottish and Welsh VSOs’ advocacy work during the pandemic. This chapter will consider how advocacy activities have been defined by the voluntary sector as well as the importance of these activities to marginalised groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The latent strength of community ties: how voluntary sector infrastructure organisations utilised their local networks in response to COVID-19
Authors: Smith Lucy
Published: May 2023

It has recently been argued that a ‘renaissance and re-enchantment’ of voluntary sector infrastructure has occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic (MacMillan 2021). Growing recognition for the contribution made by these organisations to community-level responses to the pandemic has generated discussion about the value these organisations bring to society (MacMillan 2021). During the pandemic, the work of infrastructure and charities was broadcast under the #NeverMoreNeeded hashtag, which sought to highlight the pivotal role of the voluntary sector in providing community aid projects, sometimes known as ‘community response hubs’. This chapter posits a new analytical contribution to the types of examples found under this hashtag, exploring the role played by two London-based CVSs during the spring and summer of 2020. Social network analysis (Granovetter 1973; 1985) is applied to illustrate how the organisational life, relationships and spatial presence (or ‘territorial embeddedness’, Dayson et al 2017) of two CVSs enabled them to coordinate and deliver community aid projects, both at a borough and regional level. This chapter concludes by making a case for the social value (Putnam, 1993) generated by the work of these organisations and highlights the latent strength of their community ties.
Poverty and International Migration
Authors: Eroğlu Sebnem
Published: May 2023

International migration is a life-changing process, but do the migrants and their families fare economically better than those who stayed behind?
Drawing on the largest database available on labour migration to Europe, this book seeks to shed light upon this question through an exploration of poverty outcomes for three generations of settler migrants spanning multiple European destinations, as compared with their returnee and stayer counterparts living in Turkey. As well as documenting generational trends, it investigates the transmission of poverty on to the younger generations. With its unique multi-site and intergenerational perspective, the book provides a rare insight into the economic consequences of international migration for migrants and their descendants.
Migrant poverty: scoping the empirical field
Authors: Eroğlu Şebnem
Published: May 2023

This chapter maps out the empirical works focussed on the relationship between poverty and international migration while situating them within the wider literature that qualitatively or quantitatively examines the socio-economic performances of international migrants and/or their descendants. It then presents the current research evidence on the incidence, persistence and determinants of migrant poverty. It concludes by explaining the ways in which this book will contribute to closing the gaps existing within the field.
Theorising and measuring migrant poverty
Authors: Eroğlu Şebnem
Published: May 2023

This chapter aims to introduce the approach taken here to define, measure and explain migrant poverty. To this end, it first evaluates the existing definitions of poverty and monetary and multi-dimensional perspectives on poverty measurement, and then presents the definition and the measurement method adopted here. Building upon a critical evaluation of relevant theories from the wider international migration literature, it outlines the core components of the resource-based model adapted from the author’s earlier work to examine the relationships between poverty and international migration. The chapter concludes by setting out research hypotheses for statistical testing.
Do migrants fare better than stayers?
Authors: Eroğlu Şebnem
Published: May 2023

This chapter presents and interprets the results obtained from the statistical analyses of the 2000 Families Survey data to shed light upon the poverty impact of international migration for migrants and their descendants. It starts by summarising the key tendencies emerging from the descriptive analyses of the entire sample and the sub-sample of the settlers spread across multiple European destinations. It then outlines the probit results obtained through the comparisons drawn between the settlers, returnees and stayers spanning three family generations. This is followed by a presentation of the results arising from the probit estimations performed with the sub-sample of settlers. The chapter concludes by explaining the narrative behind the statistical findings.
The pandemic and pandemic policy in the UK
Authors: Tunstall Becky
Published: May 2023

The UK had three waves of COVID-19 infections and deaths between January 2020 and the start of 2022. ‘Age-standardised’ death rates were among the highest in Europe, although lower in the second and third waves. By January 2022, there had been 390 million recorded tests, about 20 million infections and 620,000 hospital admissions, and 52 million had had at least one dose of the vaccine. A total of 148,000 people had died within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test. The increase in deaths was enough to reduce life expectancy at birth. Deaths were very unevenly distributed by age, gender, pre-existing health conditions, disability, region, neighbourhood deprivation, ethnicity and occupation. On 23 March 2020, UK government required most of the population to stay home, and measures were among the most stringent in Europe. However, locking down a week earlier would have saved an estimated 20,000 lives and might have allowed less stringency. Later lockdowns were also delayed. A House of Commons report in September 2021 described early policy as ‘one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced’.
Public policy
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines three main areas of public policy, common to almost all governments: economic policy, social welfare services, and policies for society.
Global public policy
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: May 2023

The responsibilities of states extend beyond their own borders and citizens. This chapter considers responsibilities to non-citizens, direct intervention abroad and the relations between states. Models of states as independent and sovereign sit uncomfortably with developing standards of international governance.
Welfare
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: May 2023

Competing interpretations of welfare include individual decisions, needs, the avoidance of poverty or deprivation, the sum of individual welfares, common ground or ‘collective consequentialism’, and the ‘common good’ or good of society. However, the areas provided for as ‘social welfare’ are conventional and often miss important elements of people’s well-being. Every system of welfare leaves gaps.
Disputed principles
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: May 2023

The principles that are most often disputed are equality, which is about the removal of disadvantage; purposive redistribution; social justice, which can refer to proportionate distribution but often simply means a desire for a good society; and the idea of the welfare state itself. All of these are directions of movement, rather than destinations.
Introduction
Authors: Villalón Roberta
Published: May 2023

This chapter introduces the research project by explaining the relationship between migration and health, the particularities of the Ecuadorean case, and the unique interdisciplinary and critical theoretical and methodological angle of the study. Moreover, it maps the conceptual framework that emerged from the transnational investigation of migration from Ecuador to the United States, Spain, and back, and highlights its contribution to the body of literature on health and migration. Finally, it provides a detailed account of the sample of migrants, non-migrating relatives, and health and migration service providers from which the research was developed, a reflection on activist research and ethics, and outlines the rest of the book.
Post-migration Family Relationships
Authors: Villalón Roberta
Published: May 2023

This chapter explains how migrants and non-migrating relatives dealt with the relational effects generated by outward and return migratory processes, which included novel family dynamics, members, ties, and conflicts. The psycho-sociocultural mechanism of family de/re-construction, at the core of migrants’ and relatives’ ability to cope with their altered family realities, is analyzed together with the set of five complementary mechanisms of communication distortion, subordination to concealment and deception, unspoken pacts, resentment and detachment, and sensible comprehension. This chapter incorporates significant portions of stories of health and migration from individual and group interviews and community workshops held during the transnational research. Post-migration family coping mechanisms are explained in relation to other mechanisms and health processes, and tied to underlying economic, migration, health and sociocultural policies and politics in countries of origin, transit, and destination.
State (In)action and Feminist Resistance to the Denial of Abortion Rights in Northern Ireland
Authors: McDaid Maev , Nelis Brian Christopher
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores how reproductive rights were denied in both the legal jurisdictions after partition in Ireland and how the state institutions stonewalled legislation. It examines how ‘biopower’ of the Church reached into almost all aspects of life and was thoroughly gendered and served as a disciplining force for the working class. It explores how activists confronted the inaction of the state(s), forcing bodily autonomy onto the legislative agenda. Through a range of methods, many with a focus on personal testimony, campaigns served to neutralize the grip of Church and state institutions. These had previously monopolized debate through narratives of ‘deviance’ and ‘shame’. While abortion was legalized in the south of Ireland and decriminalized in the north of Ireland, the denial of access in many areas remains. At a time when access to abortion is being threatened globally it is clear that only sustained confrontation with the state will secure provision of comprehensive reproductive healthcare services.
Gender, Policing and Social Order: Restating the Case for a Feminist Analysis of Policing
Authors: Jackson Will , Monk Helen
Published: May 2023

This chapter seeks to reassert the case that policing is, and always has been, a feminist issue. By examining current police responses to women in a range of contexts, the chapter argues that policing requires a renewed feminist analysis that should be central to a feminist criminology in the 21st century. The chapter begins by examining a range of contemporary issues that highlight problems in the police response to women and girls and, as a result, points to the enduring relevance of gender to analyses of policing. It then explores how policing was critically examined in foundational feminist criminological work in the 1980s and considers the extent to which the central ideas remain relevant and useful to us today. From this point, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that feminist theory and a critical theory of police power can be brought together to help us understand the role of gender in the vision of order pursued by police. Finally, the chapter suggests that we need to understand both the gendered forms that policing takes and the role that policing plays in (re)producing gender norms.
Sensing Injustice? Defences to Murder
Authors: Howe Adrian
Published: May 2023

On any feminist reading, men ‘getting away’ with murdering their women partners and former partners is self-evidently unjust. But could it be that when feminists demand justice for femicide victims they fall into a binary trap of assuming justice to be the self-evident opposite of injustice? This chapter explores that question in relation to feminist advocacy of criminal law reforms curtailing victim-blaming defences to murder that reinscribe historically mandated excuses for killing women and which have, until recently, frequently resulted in manslaughter verdicts that diminish victims by holding them account for contributing to their own deaths. In short, the reforms, now implemented across several Anglophone jurisdictions, were designed to counter a perceived injustice in the criminal justice system’s handling of intimate partner femicide cases. Have they had its intended effect of stopping men getting away with murder, thereby delivering justice to victims?
Racial Diversity in Contemporary France
Authors: Léonard Marie Neiges
Published: May 2023

This book aims to broaden the discussion of the taboo surrounding race and racial diversity in France, closely examining the paradox that France is a de facto multicultural society that rejects multicultural practices and policies. The book provides an insight into the French case-study as an illustration of what it means to be a colorblind society and how it operates as such. Through an examination of the French census, as well as discrimination laws and patterns in France, the 2005 ethnic riots, and the place of Islam in France, this book unveils the mechanisms, strategies, and repertoires of colorblindness. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of American sociologists, the book questions the French model of integration’s approach to race and its normative assumptions. This model of integration is based on a colorblind (no race) and religious blind (laϊ‎cité) form of citizenship that aims to incorporate differences into Frenchhood but without recognizing those differences. This denial has allowed French society to avoid acknowledging centuries of oppression of racial minorities and engaging in a national discussion about the thriving presence of systemic racism. The book thus contends that ignoring and rejecting the notion of race means precluding understanding one of the fundamental forms and forces of social stratification in contemporary France and failing to grasp some of the most important mechanisms that produce and maintain inequality.
The French Model of Integration and Colorblind Racism
Authors: Léonard Marie des Neiges
Published: May 2023

Chapter 3 explores the contemporary demography of France, underlining the issues that French scholars face when trying to provide an accurate account of the diversity of the French population in the absence of racial statistics. The chapter also examines the antidiscrimination and diversity structures and legal system currently in place in France, as well as the existing patterns of racial discrimination and racism in different sectors and institutions of French society, namely employment, education, housing, health, and the police. In particular, the chapter exposes the problematic effects of colorblindness and the French government’s reforms and policies that use a culturalized narrative (or ethnicity) as a proxy for race, which still has consequences in the 21st century, notably with regard to discrimination patterns against racial minorities.
Rioting the Residences and Reclaiming the Republic
Authors: Léonard Marie des Neiges
Published: May 2023

Chapter 5 relates and describes the 2005 riots that took place in the French banlieues (suburbs), as well as their aftermath. It also presents the different approaches that have previously been used to examine the riots and offers an alternative analysis by applying Bonilla-Silva’s concept of colorblind racism and Feagin’s notion of the White racial frame to the French context. The chapter additionally discusses the ideas behind the French model of integration, showing its inadequacies in recognizing the issues of discrimination and systemic racism that French minorities face on a daily basis.
Capital and Context
Authors: Ashley Louise
Published: May 2023

This chapter provides context for the analysis that follows, including to define the City of London and the roles which comprise its ‘top jobs’, and introduce key debates including its role in driving steep inequalities of income and wealth, controversies surrounding social mobility and myths of merit, and how these factors relate. It also introduces the theoretical framework that provides the structure for the book, showing how Bourdieusian and Weberian approaches to social class are combined with neo-institutional theory to explain how labour markets reproduce inequalities while simultaneously helping to affirm hierarchies of occupational status. Finally, it outlines the book’s contribution to recent academic debates, introduces the data on which it is based, and considers questions of confidentiality, ethics, including as they relate to and the author’s own background and position.
Rethinking Respect
Authors: Ashley Louise
Published: May 2023

In the face of the challenges outlined, this final chapter concludes the book by considering what those who wish to see progress in this area can do instead. It underlines that continued efforts at social mobility may result in small wins but returns to the underlying paradox running throughout the book: as City firms make gestures toward social mobility, this functions to legitimate the very inequalities that make this less likely to happen, and which they help to create. These inequalities have negative consequences for all of us and our collective acceptance of associated extremes at both ends of the scale of income and wealth denotes a set of norms that are not worthy of respect. The chapter concludes by underlining that we must challenge these social conventions, create a different set of cultural scripts, and drive a more radical response, from organizations and the state, which would look far beyond current concerns with social mobility and tackle deep and persistent structural inequalities of income and wealth.
‘A Necessary Evil’: Progress through Normalising Inequalities and Competition
Authors: Maronitis Kostas , Pencheva Denny
Published: May 2023

Chapter 3 deploys the concept of resilience in order to analyse the role inequality plays in the competitive labour market. Focusing on the nationwide campaign Pick for Britain that aimed at recruiting domestic horticultural and farm workers and on the Thank you Amazon Teams campaign praising drivers and warehouse workers, we argue that the good of the nation and the good of the corporation converge in the interpellation of the worker as a subject that needs to respond and adapt to demands for lower immigration and higher productivity while accepting inequality as an inevitability of an economy incapable of reconciling immigration and automation with decent working conditions.
I, Robot
Authors: Maronitis Kostas , Pencheva Denny
Published: May 2023

Chapter 4 tells the story of how technological development and automation of work dominated political thinking and policy. It tells the story of technological fear, suspicion and inevitability.The chapter overviews and examines a wide range of policy documents and reports on automation, robotics and technological displacement with a theoretical framework provided by Marx, Polanyi and the operaismo movement. We argue that the competitive relationship between robot workers and human workers framed by the principles of labour cost, efficiency and productivity results in the shift from the integration of workers as a collective in a volatile social and economic environment to a project of self-realisation by establishing links between performance, knowledge and the ability to remain employable in a competitive automated economy.
Conclusion: Algorithmic Thinking and the Will to Automate
Authors: Beer David
Published: May 2023

Drawing together the threads of the book, this chapter argues that algorithmic thinking can only be understood through an analysis of its tensions. It looks at the different forces and tensions explored throughout the book to build upon this central argument. In addition, the chapter then turns to Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘will to know’, arguing that what we are now seeing is a mutation of this into a desire or will to automate.
The Nature and Scale of Interpersonal Violence in Britain
Authors: Billingham Luke , Irwin-Rogers Keir
Published: May 2023

This chapter presents the latest statistical data available to us on the phenomenon of violence between young people. Inherent limitations notwithstanding, this data appears to show a number of key trends, including: levels of interpersonal violence in England and Wales have been declining since the mid-1990s; the vast majority of interpersonal violence is committed by men, and the vast majority involves a single perpetrator; since 2015, adults (those aged over 25) have been responsible for a higher percentage of interpersonal violence in England and Wales than children and young people (those aged under 24); since 2015, offences involving use of knives in England and Wales have increased, as have hospital admissions for assaults involving sharp objects; in absolute terms, there are more victims and perpetrators of homicide in London aged over 20 than under 20, but under 20s as a group have a higher rate of homicide victims and perpetrators.
Social Harm and Mattering in Young People’s Lives
Authors: Billingham Luke , Irwin-Rogers Keir
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines some of the social harms which we believe are having the most significant effects on children and young people in today’s Britain, focusing on poverty and inequality; declining welfare support; harms within the education system; unemployment and marginal work; and housing issues. We discuss how they can affect young people’s need fulfilment and subjective well-being, and ways in which they can structurally belittle. We argue that the cumulative, grinding effects of these harms are felt as daily pressure and pain by those affected. They may not be visible and may thus be erroneously viewed as ‘background’, inert features of people’s lives, but these harms disfigure days and alter life trajectories. They do not overwhelm individual agency or remove the moral responsibility from young people for their actions, but we will have little hope of understanding or explaining those actions if we do not attend to their daily effects.
Social Harm, Mattering and Violence
Authors: Billingham Luke , Irwin-Rogers Keir
Published: May 2023

In this chapter, we suggest that the concentration of social harm in particular communities and biographies is incendiary: it reliably produces the kinds of violent emotion which we know to predictably precipitate physical interpersonal violence. This is a socio-historical problem: it is about the way that, over time, our nation’s policies, systems and institutions have created a profound maldistribution of social goods (meaning that some communities lack the conditions for flourishing) and an equally marked maldistribution of social ‘bads’ (meaning that some communities encounter an accumulation of actively belittling and diminishing experiences). Drawing together our conceptualizations of structural harm and mattering, we endeavour to show how structural features of society – such as policies, systems and institutions – can have a corrosive effect on young people’s sense of mattering, in a manner which is likely to foster feelings of shame and humiliation which we know to increase a person’s propensity to violence.
‘Everywhere’ or ‘Over There’? Managing and Spatializing the Perceived Risks of Gender-Based Violence on a Girls’ Night Out
Authors: Nicholls Emily
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the ways in which women negotiate, manage – and to a degree accept – gender-based violence (GBV) on a ‘girls’ night out’, drawing on original research conducted with young women in north-east England. With a particular focus on mainstream bar, pub and club spaces where patterns of (hetero)sexualized interaction are normalized and expected, the chapter highlights the spatial dynamics that were apparent in young women’s accounts of risk and safety when clubbing and consuming alcohol with their female friends. Specifically, it identifies a tension in the ways in which women framed GBV; it was simultaneously positioned as pervasive and inevitable (‘everywhere’) and as something that took place in certain ‘risky’ venues and parts of town (‘over there’). In this sense, risk could be imagined as confined to particular ‘rough’ or ‘working-class’ areas in the city centre, yet at the same time, a degree of GBV was regarded as an embedded and normalized part of the entire mainstream nightlife scene. This normalization of GBV across the night-time economy may help to legitimize a broader spectrum of GBV and reinforce the idea that women should both expect and accept it in their daily lives.
Internal Homelessness and Hiraeth: Boys’ Spatial Journeys Between Childhood Domestic Abuse and On-Road
Authors: Levell Jade
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the spatial dynamics that are faced by men who experience domestic violence and abuse (DVA) at home in childhood, and who become involved with gangs/​on-road. Drawing on in-depth life story interviews with survivors of child DVA, this chapter illustrates participants’ complicated relationships with space in relation to their experiences of DVA. This chapter examines how these men constructed their masculine subjectivities in spatially specific ways, arguing that the use of public and private spaces can operate as a gendered strategy for coping with childhood DVA.
Woman Abuse in Rural Places: Towards a Spatial Understanding
Authors: DeKeseredy Walter
Published: May 2023

Interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical work on violence against rural women has mushroomed since the turn of the century. Heavily influenced by the recent scholarly contributions of a few Australian feminist criminologists, the main objective of this chapter is twofold: (1) to examine what the extant social scientific literature reveals about how the social and contextual characteristics of rurality contribute to high rates of male-to-female abuse in private places and (2) to suggest new directions in empirical work. The new avenues of empirical inquiry recommended here are cross-cultural surveys, prospective and longitudinal studies, quantitative research on male-to-female psychological abuse, and studies of the extent, nature, distribution, causes and consequences of the online victimization of women living in non-metropolitan areas.
Transnational Regimes of Family Violence: When Violence Against Women Crosses Borders
Authors: Bredal Anja
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores how gender-based family violence is not always limited to the nation state but can also be perpetrated, endured and facilitated transnationally. In research to date only some aspects of what is conceptualized here as transnational regimes of violence have been explored. This study takes a broader approach, outlining (1) transnational elements in regimes of violence, (2) how abuse and control cross national borders and (3) transnationality as a conducive context for regimes of violence. The analysis focuses on violence against women from male partners and in-laws and on violence against adolescent daughters from their parents and other kin. The empirical basis is interviews with women of immigrant background living in Norway and judgments from Norwegian Criminal Courts. Building on established theories of domestic violence as regime and continuum, the concept ‘transnational regime of family violence’ is offered as a contribution to ongoing attempts to theorize the spatiality of gender-based violence. The concept captures how the actors’ attachment to several nation states produces specific opportunity structures for abusers and specific vulnerabilities for the abused.
Between NGO-ization and Militarization: Women’s Rights in the Fragile Geographies of Niger
Authors: Anderson Kristine
Published: May 2023

Niger, like its neighbours in the Sahel, has since the early 2010s faced increased violence and insecurity that has captured significant geopolitical attention. Niger’s armed forces are mobilized throughout the country to quell insurgencies, while a number of international forces are present under the auspices of capacity-building missions providing equipment, training, intelligence and other behind-the-scenes activities aimed at empowering the national military and state apparatus to provide protection to citizens. Simultaneously, Niger is populated by international and national non-governmental organizations and United Nations agencies, which play a role in generating discourse and practice around gender-based violence and women’s rights. As military and humanitarian actors with different methods and discourse find themselves sharing the same operating spaces, the resulting dynamic is one of simultaneous NGO-ization, in which (largely international) actors overtake the civil and discursive space for women’s rights; and militarization, which privileges violence and thus restricts the safety and agency of women and girls. This chapter argues that concurrence of these phenomena obstructs women’s participation and is productive of gender-based violence, ultimately contributing to the spiralling fragility of the country.
Neither Seen Nor Heard: State-Sanctioned Violence Against Women Prisoners in Australia
Authors: Kilroy Debbie , Lean Tabitha , Quixley Suzi
Published: May 2023

In prisons across Australia1, women are rendered socially and geographically invisible, with little accountability for how they are treated. These institutionalized settings replicate women’s previous experiences of violence, particularly domestic and family violence. Like violent partners, prison officers are free to arbitrarily demand women’s unquestioning obedience to directions (no matter how unreasonable) and impose punishment. Too often, strip-searching and solitary confinement – practices that amount to torture under the UN Convention Against Torture – are used to contain and control women prisoners. Most women leave prison retraumatized and at increased risk of sexual, domestic and systemic violence.
This chapter explores the way in which the invisibility of prisons in Australia has been used to mask the harm they do to women with lived experience of violence, and their role in legitimizing and perpetuating violence against women. It includes a focus on the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women prisoners, who are by far the fastest-growing cohort of prisoners in Australia and who are particularly affected by violence in all its forms.
‘There Is Always a Reason for the Beatings’: Interrogating the Reproduction of Gender-Based Violence Within Private and Public Spaces
Authors: Keli Haje
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines violence against women by law enforcement officers, staff designated to assist domestic violence survivors in the Directorate to Combat Violence Against Women (DCVAW) and legislators in Iraqi Kurdistan, drawing on an ethnography of women’s experiences of violence in the public sphere, and interviews with domestic violence survivors, senior officials and junior staff working in the Directorate. The survivors and the people designated to assist them held often contrasting views of the objectives of the state in terms of obtaining justice and protection for survivors, and the findings point to a general ineptitude of DCVAW staff members, with many displaying limited and inaccurate knowledge of the domestic violence law that provided the basis for their work. Additionally, the survivors faced further subjugation by DCVAW staff, some of whom stated that violence against women was justified if women transgressed gender norms and who often disbelieved the women’s stories. Survivors were also exposed to verbal violence at the Directorate, often witnessed by the researcher, and even physical violence and confinement.
‘It’s Not Your Fault’: Place, Promises to the Future and Honouring the Memory of Eurydice Dixon
Authors: Loughnan Claire
Published: May 2023

The 2018 sexual assault and murder of Eurydice Dixon, during her walk home on a winter’s evening in Melbourne, Australia, led to the spontaneous emergence of a temporary yet beautiful memorial on the site in the public park where she was attacked. Much of the public discussion that followed her death focused on the persistent risk experienced by women in public spaces, in which neither their bodies nor the spaces they move through, are experienced as their own. However, in examining the memorialization of Eurydice’s death, I show how this site also held the potential to emerge as an alternative site of justice. I explore messages of sorrow, and pledges left by those who visited the site, to suggest how such sites of mourning might offer the promise of a future justice for all those subjected to violence.
Introduction
Authors: Brewster David
Published: May 2023

Chapter 1 introduces the core themes and purpose of the book, which is centred around exploring and explaining inter- and intra-national policy convergence and divergence in cannabis control through an examination of policy-making processes. In contextualizing this focus, the chapter first offers an overview of, and critiques put towards, David Garland’s influential The Culture of Control, and goes on to identify how the book builds on and contributes to existing debates. This is followed with a discussion of the methodological approach that underpins the findings of the book, including the use of Kingdon’s multiple streams model, the selection of empirical foci, the comparative research design, the use of elite interviews and documentary analysis and techniques of data analysis. The chapter concludes with an overview of the chapters of the book.