bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Nullius no more? Valorising vacancy through urban agriculture in the settler-colonial ‘green city’
Authors: McClintock Nathan
Published: May 2022

Drawing on research conducted in three North American cities renowned for their commitment to sustainability – Portland, Vancouver, and Montreal – I illustrate how practitioners and entrepreneurial ‘growth machine’ actors alike employ urban agriculture as a means of valorising vacant properties. Municipal officials cash in on the symbolic sustainability capital that gardens provide, while activists cultivate gardens on vacant lots as a means of ‘reclaiming the city’. A growing body of literature on settler colonialism and racial capitalism, however, elucidates how the discursive production of vacancy underlying such valorisation efforts reproduces settler-colonial logics of racialised dispossession and effaces existing uses, relations, and sovereignties. Even the most progressive of initiatives, such as commoning, frequently turn on such pernicious logics. Vacancy, in this light, takes on new valence as a vital mechanism of (always ongoing) colonisation, and thus also a lively terrain of (longstanding) contestation.
Spatio-legal world-making in vacant buildings: property politics and squatting movements in the city of São Paulo
Authors: Caulkins Matthew
Published: May 2022

This chapter draws on Delaney’s discussion of the making of distinct spatio-legal worlds to argue urban vacancy is not a singular phenomenon. Three conflicting spatio-legal logics are analysed as they clash in the specific space of a vacant building in the centre of the city of São Paulo. A market logic justifies the owner's free disposal of their property. The state’s formal logic is divided between judge’s support of owner’s rights and attempts to activate vacant property following the social function of property enshrined in the Brazilian constitution. A local squatting movement justifies the occupation based on the same social function of property and active inhabitance of the vacant building. The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with residents and coordinators at the occupation and local state officials. The chapter concludes that vacancy is an empty signifier filled by different spatio-legal projects and counter-projects.
Conclusion: Centring vacancy – towards a research agenda
Authors: O’Callaghan Cian , Feliciantonio Cesare Di
Published: May 2022

In this concluding chapter we reflect on what we can learn from the chapters in this book about working critically and productively with ruins and urban vacancy as a lens to interrogate wider urban challenges. We briefly map out a research agenda based on two primary components: i) to provide a more nuanced continuum between ruins and vacant space and ii) to emphasise the processes and conceptual work involved in articulating three different manifestations (the ruin, vacancy as empty space, and vacancy as resource for the commons).
Healthcare funding
Authors: Greener Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapter presents an analysis of 11 countries in terms of their patterns of healthcare funding – measured in terms of overall funding level, and their levels of government funding (including compulsory insurance), voluntary health insurance and out-of-pocket contributions. It measures health funding in terms of access to healthcare and efficiency. It finds that two of the countries also achieving strong performance in terms of social determinants (Norway and Sweden) also achieve both of these outcomes well, and here are joined by the UK and New Zealand as being the highest performing.
Spending on health
Authors: Greener Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapter considers healthcare expenditure patterns for 10 countries using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, compared to the outcomes of health outcomes and the care process. It finds there is a ‘care/outcomes’ paradox, with countries often having high care scores doing relatively poorly in terms of health outcomes. It therefore suggests that health outcomes might be a better measure in terms of expenditure patterns, and finds that the highest performing countries have higher levels of overall health expenditure and higher long-term expenditures in common, but that another pathway is achieved by Australia and France with the opposite of those factors in place.
The Legal Aid Market
Authors: Wilding Jo
Published: May 2022

Even though legal aid is available for people seeking asylum, there is uneven access to advice across Britain. Based on empirical research, this book offers fresh thinking on what has gone wrong in the legal aid market. It presents a rare picture of the barristers, solicitors and caseworkers practising immigration law in charities and private firms. In doing so, this book examines supply and demand and illuminates what constitutes high-quality legal aid work/provision, subsequent conflicts with financial rationality and how practitioners resolve these issues. Challenging existing legal aid policy, this book presents innovative insights to ensure public service markets around the globe function well for all those involved.
Why we need to think about systems
Authors: Wilding Jo
Published: May 2022

Resolving the problems set out in the book demands a whole-system approach built around demand. This concluding chapter demonstrates that point, using the account of attempts, in 2020, to reform the asylum appeals procedure without corresponding amendments to the legal aid payment regime, meaning that barristers would have been unpaid altogether for cases where they succeeded at an early stage. It draws together the themes set out in Chapter 2, showing how policy debris and hostility have created dysfunctionality in the system and arguing that any future changes to legal aid need to be based on evidence about the drivers and consequences of demand, created by the Home Office’s asylum systems and the courts’ systems and procedures.
Care at Home for People Living with Dementia
Authors: Ceci Christine , Purkis Mary Ellen
Published: May 2022

This book is an account of an ethnographic study designed to learn more about how families handle everyday life in the context of dementia, with the idea that if what families were already doing was better understood, their own efforts could be better supported. By following, and learning from, family arrangements for care, the question of what makes care for a family member living with dementia possible or impossible, easier or more difficult, is foregrounded. This question is also traced beyond the specific site of home to consider the ways that health and social care services and policy orientations are organized to support and/or hinder family arrangements. The book contributes to theorizing the intersections between what often seem unrelated: the formal care policies that articulate strategies to ‘manage’ populations of older people living with a diagnosis of dementia, the care practices of those at the frontlines who are responding to what often seem like overwhelming needs, and the care practices of families working to make everyday life liveable.
The methodological approach and theoretical lens taken locates this work in a growing field of care practices research that is informed by the relational logic of material semiotics. This lens shifts the reader’s gaze from the isolated caregiver-care recipient dyad, and draws attention to the practical arrangements of bodies, objects, discourses, spaces and relations that constitute everyday living for persons living with dementia and their carers.
Studying family care practices
Authors: Ceci Christine , Purkis Mary Ellen
Published: May 2022

Home-based caring for persons living with dementia brings with it many problems that are widely acknowledged as in need of long term sustainable solutions in order to address families’ needs for support and assistance. Chapter 1 overviews the social, cultural, and economic contexts in which these discussions about care at home for people living with dementia are occurring – this discussion also provides the background to the ethnographic study including the rationale for central questions and approach of the study. In describing the approach taken, dominant trends in dementia and family care research and policy are reviewed and the case is made for studying care at home as a ‘care practice.’ Care practices research and the theoretical lens used in the study are described and discussed in terms of how these framings open up understanding of care at home for people living with dementia.
From strategy to service: practices of identification and the work of organizing dementia services
Authors: Ceci Christine , Purkis Mary Ellen
Published: May 2022

Around the world, resources have been devoted to the development of national strategy documents responding to an increasing incidence of dementia. A review of diverse national dementia plans demonstrates similarity in the framing of approaches to addressing dementia within the population. Key to all these strategies is the encouragement to seek early diagnosis of the disease so that treatment can begin early and health care organizations can gain advance warning of future needs for service delivery. This strategic direction comes to constitute the ‘ideal program’ in dementia care planning. Discussions with key informants responsible for planning service delivery for people living with dementia suggest that significant numbers of people fail to seek early diagnosis. Families often accommodate changes in behaviour of family members, making small changes to everyday plans and routines that result in reducing the impact of changes in behaviour. While the strategy to obtain ‘early diagnosis’ may not often translate into everyday practice, planners and providers engage in sophisticated and quite singular ‘practices of identification’ to enable system ‘navigation’ even at later stages of disease progression to attempt support for people living with dementia.
Relations between formal and family care: divergent practices in care at home for people living with dementia
Authors: Ceci Christine , Purkis Mary Ellen
Published: May 2022

Good ways to think about how family care practices and those of the formal system relate is a theoretical and practical problem of longstanding. Few would disagree that the ways that families and formal care systems handle daily life are different, with extensive research efforts undertaken over many decades addressed to these issues - yet problems in relations persist. In this chapter the philosophical work of Isabelle Stengers is used to open up and rethink this problem. Specifically, divergences in family and formal care practices are analysed through Stengers’ conceptualization of an ‘ecology of practices.’ In Stengers’ view, what makes a practice diverge is also what makes it a particular practice; overriding these differences and imposing similarity, such as efforts to ‘professionalize’ family caregiving, can damage the practice so aligned. Instead Stengers’ figure of the diplomat shows how diverging practices that have common interests - but not necessarily the same interests - might relate. One family’s experiences in daily life with dementia is used to show the relevance of this ecological theorizing of divergence in practices, and to make a case for the need for diplomatic relations between practices that leave ‘borders’ and thus practices intact.
Patterning dementia
Authors: Ceci Christine , Purkis Mary Ellen
Published: May 2022

This chapter begins from the observation that dealing biomedically with dementia brings with it a set of activities that work to name and frame dementia, significant because once named and framed, the reality of dementia becomes patterned and once patterned, in turn patterns what is being done. To see this patterning, the processes through which dementia has come to matter for three families involved in the research are explored: these are processes and practices through which dementia is experienced, named, measured, treated and drawn into everyday living. To pose these processes as a question does not suggest that there is no ‘real’ dementia or problematic situations to be dealt with but simply that there is also a patterning of dementia - or a ‘dementia trajectory’ - that is a product of local and contingent practices. Questions of patterning can be highlighted or left in the background - but if highlighted they generate a complexity in understanding living with dementia that can’t be flattened out. It is this complexity that is the focus of this chapter. How do assumptions about the nature of the problem contribute to the ongoing shape of care?
Borders and helpfulness
Authors: Ceci Christine , Purkis Mary Ellen
Published: May 2022

In this chapter the borders of helpfulness are explored through the case studies, particularly the question of whether health and social care systems, at least in their current configurations, can do more than ‘prop up’ families? What does sustaining families look like? How do families deal with what they find problematic? And then, when they need help, what does helpfulness look like and what do these stories show us about how it could be better supported? Recognizing that helpfulness cannot be predetermined challenges and has implications for policy and planning services.
Beyond austerity: pro-public strategies versus public-private partnership scandals
Authors: Whiteside Heather
Published: May 2022

Decades of austerity have led to a public infrastructure investment crisis, with spending gaps now being largely addressed through public-private partnerships (PPPs). However, the normalization of PPPs today ignores a long run, scandalous track record: market monopolization by corrupt and inept private partners, troublesome bankruptcies and bailouts, and national revenue extraction through private partner equity rights and offshoring practices. Alternatives to austerity thus require not only more spending, but also new types and sources beyond private finance. How these dynamics are playing out in the context of the 2020 pandemic is equally explored.
A fragile triangle: collective bargaining systems, trade unions and the state in the EU
Authors: Lehndorff Steffen
Published: May 2022

The weakening of collective bargaining systems has been one of the top priorities within the so-called “new economic governance” at EU level over the past decade. Based on the Stability and Growth Pact and its tightening in the course of the Euro zone crisis, decentralisation and fragmentation of collective bargaining geared to promote labour cost-based competitiveness has become common standard in the “country-specific recommendations” within the “European Semester”. This approach has been pushed forward most vigorously in Southern Europe. Quite surprisingly, however, the outcomes of these attacks differ substantially across countries. The paper describes the different dynamics of collective bargaining systems in Spain, Italy and Greece over recent years and gives some tentative explanations for these differences, pointing primarily at contrasting trade union approaches.
Further, the paper addresses the potentials of the state at national and EU levels to act as a stabilizer, rather than a driver of weakening collective bargaining systems. Given the stark contrasts in industrial relations practices across EU countries, it suggests practical steps to be taken towards a turnaround in EU policy approaches to collective bargaining within the framework of the “European Semester”, following the logic of an enabling state aimed at fostering social equity.
Reducing the burden: international struggles against illegitimate debt
Authors: Sorg Christoph
Published: May 2022

Austerity measures have faced one of the biggest and most dynamic waves of protest in recent decades. While a pluralism of issues converged in the occupied squares of 2011, such as stagnating wages, housing rights, political corruption etc., debt constituted one of the pivotal themes of claim-making. From the sudden contraction of financial markets precipitating household debt traps, bankruptcies and evictions, to the devastating effects of austerity justified by sovereign debt crises, the issue of debt reflected larger questions of democratic decision-making and economic life. This brief contribution aims to situate debt-centered movements and the issue of debt within more and less recent anti-austerity struggles. These movements challenge the neoliberal notion that all “debts have to be paid” and additionally blame creditors as well as rules privileging creditors for existing debt burden instead of supposed failures by debtors. By way of observing actually existing movements and their practices we can also get a better view of existing alternatives to austerity and neoliberal debt politics in different countries.
Austerity after COVID-19: from emergency pragmatism to inclusive economic governance in Europe
Authors: Urban Hans-Jürgen , Kramer Sebastian
Published: May 2022

The process of European integration needs to be directed towards a fundamentally new path if the EU wants to surmount economic, social and environmental problems it is facing. On the one hand, this necessity emanates from the legacy of the damage caused by the EU’s austerity and structural adjustment policies. At the same time, it is indispensable, because the growth model prevailing in the EU is reaching its social and environmental limits and has become a real obstacle for sustainable prosperity. What is needed is a transition to a mode of economic governance that not only opens up scope to overcome austerity and structural reform policies, but which also offers a functional framework for the indispensable social-ecological transformation of the economy. Such an objective calls for inclusive economic governance, which, in overcoming the austerity regime, combines environmental, social as well as democratic policy objectives.
The rise of neoliberalism
Authors: Fanning Bryan
Published: May 2022

This chapter focuses on the emergence of the intellectual case for neoliberalism both before and after the Second World War. Neoliberalism rose in opposition to left and right forms of totalitarianism and isolationism from the 1930s. The original intellectual champions of neoliberalism subscribed to an implicit utopian vision where the best of all possible worlds would be one without borders to trade or barriers to the ongoing division of labour and where global peace and prosperity would be spontaneously fostered by economic interdependencies. It examines the ideas of Walter Lippmann, who emphasized that laissez faire was a revolutionary political idea but once it had served its revolutionary purpose, it proved incapable of guiding public policy. The chapter also tackles the ideas of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, and Margaret Thatcher, among others.
At home in the world: overcoming the predicament of complexity and hegemony
Authors: Wagenaar Hendrik , Prainsack Barbara
Published: May 2022

This chapter frames the challenges brough in relief by the Covid-19 pandemic as a predicament, and utopia-as-a-systematic-method as a way of addressing them. Our human predicament has two faces: complexity and hegemony. Both explain the often futile and counterproductive efforts at collective problem solving. Complexity means that the outcomes of a system are determined by the dynamic interactions between its elements. It makes the world unpredictable and resistant to policy interventions. Hegemony describes a situation in which we are unable to see beyond our cognitive and moral horizon, to the point that the world as it is appears self-evident to us. To overcome complexity and hegemony we use a systematic approach of utopian thinking that consists of three elements: An ‘archaeological’ part in which we construct or reconstruct a particular image of the good society. An ‘ontological’ part in which we address the question of what kind of people specific social and institutional arrangements encourage. And an ‘architectural’ part which is concerned with the design of alternative institutional and social arrangements that bring about the desired form of human flourishing.
Redefining work and income
Authors: Wagenaar Hendrik , Prainsack Barbara
Published: May 2022

Before the COVID-19 crisis, when politicians across the Global North were praising record levels of employment, this barely masked the fact that many jobs did not pay enough for people to live. Contrary to the common trope of robots stealing people’s jobs, politics and policies that have allowed for wages to stagnate while both productivity and costs of living were on the rise have led to the need to reassess the nature and role of work in our societies. One line of reasoning is to widen the definition of work by including the large amount of unpaid work in our society, such as caring for children, the sick and the elderly. Another line of reasoning is to disentangle employment and income – Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend was one expression of this growing trend. The COVID-crisis has fuelled this debate on Universal Basic Income in the sense that it has made us acutely aware of the vulnerabilities of societies where the loss of a job equates the loss of income. This chapter covers several approaches to the reorganization of the link between work and income, including Job Guarantees.
Prisons of the World
Authors: Coyle Andrew
Published: May 2022

Using striking examples of imprisonment in different continents and cultures Prisons of the World raises fundamental questions about the manner in which governments and societies (mis)use prison as a response to a wide range of fundamental social, economic and political issues. It describes the mistreatment of women prisoners in North America and the United Kingdom and of elderly prisoners in Japan, the intractable influence of gangs in Latin America, the legacy of colonialism in South Africa and the Caribbean and the continuing influence of the Gulag system in many countries of the former Soviet Union. The book discusses the work of international bodies such as the Committee for the Prevention of Torture in Europe, the involvement of the Inter American Court of Human Rights in the Caribbean and of court interventions in respect of the excessive use of solitary confinement in Canada and the United States. There is also a description of the author’s involvement in a unique instance of prison monitoring to resolve a violent dispute between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The book concludes by offering some positive pointers for the future. In the medium term many of the resources which are currently invested in the demand led imprisonment industry could be transferred to initiatives such as those which are known as Justice Reinvestment and in the longer term radical change could be achieved through use of the Human Development model.
Towards ‘a better way’
Authors: Coyle Andrew
Published: May 2022

This chapter offers some positive pointers for the future, taking up the plea of President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic writing from his prison cell about the need to find ‘a better way of coming to terms with certain things’. After 50 years immersed in the prisons of the world the author concludes that this ‘better way’ will not be found inside prisons, nor by those who seek to reform them, nor by the academics and others who study them. In the medium term it is much more likely to come about if the resources which are currently invested in the demand led imprisonment industry are substantially transferred to initiatives such as those which have come to be known as Justice Reinvestment and in the longer term the ‘better way’ can be achieved through the Human Development model.
Retreat or Resolution?
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: May 2022

Although higher education in the United Kingdom has expanded opportunities for much of the population, in many ways it remains stubbornly elitist. In order to address this crisis in education, this book examines the development of mass higher education and proposes a ‘radical escape-forward’. The book calls for more robust action to secure fair access at all levels and changes in the governance and management at both system and institutional levels to ensure more democratic accountability. Setting out a clear and radical programme for reform, the book makes an important contribution to current debates in education in the context of the evolution of the UK economy and wider society.
The arts of making-sense in uncertain times: arts-based research and autoethnography
Authors: Green Amanda , Levey Bettina , Evans Wendy , Lawson Kathrin
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses performative research approaches through the lens of self-as-subject in creative research. The researchers, a collective of arts therapists, call this approach abr+a (arts-based research through autoethnography).
Informed by the suggestion that the research process should correspond as closely as possible to the experience of therapy, the researchers blend arts-based research (ABR) and autoethnography. Simultaneously a practice, process and product, ABR is an ‘aesthetic way of knowing’ where the researcher investigates a research question through artistic creating during data gathering/generation and/or analysis/translation and/or presentation. Autoethnography studies ‘the culture of self’ or others through self, encouraging researchers to start with their own lived experiences as a way of uncovering new ways of knowing and understanding wider cultural beliefs.
The use of objects to enhance online social research interviews
Authors: Zakher Hoda
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses the use of objects to enhance online interviewing in social research. Interviewees were invited to bring an object of personal value to facilitate a discussion on ‘happiness in lockdown.’ This chapter explores the benefits and challenges of using objects in online social research interviews and presents some observations about the dynamics and the type of thematic materials gathered. Selecting objects gives research participants some control and ability to steer the discussion, shifting the discussion towards the participant’s own values, beliefs and views, and allowing these to be explored in greater depth. Using thematic analysis, the authors explore the richness, depth and genuineness of the materials gathered in object-based online research interviews.
Women, media and elections
Authors: Harmer Emily
Published: May 2022

In the century since women were first eligible to stand and vote in British general elections, they have relied on news media to help them gain information about politics, and to represent their political perspectives in the public realm. This book advances our understanding of the gendered mediation of women in politics by providing a systematic analysis of electoral coverage which charts how women candidates, voters, politicians’ spouses, and party leaders have been portrayed in newspapers from 1918-2017. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative analysis, the book presents a fascinating picture of continuities and changes in the position of women in British politics. It also highlights, for the first time, a number of important similarities and differences in the mediation of women depending on what role they play in politics, showing that gendered mediation is a complex phenomenon. The book adds substantially to our knowledge of how gendered and sexist news coverage has developed and fluctuated overtime, and crucially the book also argues that gender is and indispensable factor in understanding broader changes in election news coverage over time.
The Spouses and Relatives: From ‘Ideal Election Wife’ to ‘Just Another Political Wife’
Authors: Harmer Emily
Published: May 2022

The chapter provides a systematic analysis of the mediated representation of female relatives of politicians to see how their role and gendered representation changed from 1918-2015. The chapter first explains why investigating the portrayal of such women is a vital component of understanding why election coverage is gendered, then discusses the scant literature on politicians’ spouse’s media representation. The chapter then traces what proportion of the relatives are party leaders’ wives, what role they perform in the coverage, the extent to which their coverage mentions their appearance, and the proportion of coverage which evaluates them negatively. The chapter then present a qualitative analysis of the changing role of politicians’ relatives over time, followed by an analysis of the gendered consequences of increasingly personalised newspaper coverage.
The Leaders: ‘Iron Ladies’ and ‘Dangerous’ Women
Authors: Harmer Emily
Published: May 2022

This chapter analyses how women party leaders have been represented in news coverage of elections from 1979-2017. It first summarises existing work about the mediated representation of women leaders. The chapter traces some key trends over time, including: if and how they were evaluated, how frequently they were directly quoted, and how often coverage of them mentioned their appearance and family situation. These results will also be compared to those for ordinary women politicians to see if leadership makes any difference to gendered mediation. The final section presents a qualitative analysis which shows how news coverage of leaders is gendered by analysing how their leadership is depicted as advantageous for women in general, to what extent news coverage catches women leaders in gendered double binds, and, finally, how personalised coverage is problematic for women leaders.
International Organizations and Small States
Authors: Corbett Jack , Yi-chong Xu , Weller Patrick
Published: May 2022

Multilateralism and the institutions of global governance are premised on two norms: the sovereignty equality of states and the right to development. This book considers how actors interpret these norms when practicing diplomacy by examining the interaction between international organisations (IO) and the proportion of their membership who should benefit the most from a rules-based order: small states. The IO’s dilemma is that while their founding principles require them to be responsive to all members, increased participation threatens effectiveness. The small states’ dilemma is that while a permissive liberal order ensures their survival, the costs of participation are disproportionately high. Drawing on extensive qualitative data, including more than 80 interviews conducted specifically for this book, we find that the strategies both IOs and smalls states adopt to balance their respective dilemmas can explain patterns and variations in their interactions across IOs, including the UN agencies, The World Bank, The World Trade Organisation, The International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organisation, and the World Intellectual Property Organisation.
Differentiated Vulnerabilities, Climate Change, and the UN Agencies
Authors: Corbett Jack , Yi-chong Xu , Weller Patrick
Published: May 2022

In Chapter Four we take the ‘most likely’ case for SIDS influence: climate change. We show how the competent performance of vulnerability and the quest for throughput legitimacy have enabled SIDS to become champions of progressive action on this issue. We show how the label SIDS has enabled them to do so, both in the UNGA and UNFCCC processes but also how they politicised an IO like the IMO that had previously been a predominantly technical institution. The success of SIDS in drawing attention to their vulnerabilities to achieve progressive action on climate change demonstrates how their participation in IOs can matter.
Reimagining Academic Activism
Authors: Weatherall Ruth
Published: May 2022

Drawing from an ethnography with a feminist anti-violence collective, this book explores how we can reimagine the relationship between academia and activism to create novel opportunities for social change. The book tells two interconnected stories: the story of a collective fighting gendered violence in an ever-shifting non-profit sector context and the story of an ethnographer learning from the collective about identity and social change. Rather than offering a prescriptive account of how academics can collaborate with activists, these intertwined stories ask us to question how we draw lines between what counts as academic/activist, theory/practice, reason/emotion, and mind/body. Unfixing these lines helps us to develop our imaginative capacity for identifying and dismantling injustice and share tools to (re)build a more just world. This book is an account of the social justice tools of feminist anti-violence activists including strong emotions and alternative organising, the unsettling the gendered body, and storytelling about feminist identity. This book is also an account of how those tools were taken up to reimagine academic activism. Beyond asking us how we might ‘do good’, however, this book asks us what we might become.
Unsettling the In/Out
Authors: Weatherall Ruth
Published: May 2022

This chapter sets the stage for a holistic reimagination of academic activism. A rhizomatic approach, based on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, offers a framework for rethinking the interconnections between academia, activism, and social change. Within that framework, this chapter introduces the social justice work of the feminist anti-violence movement within the community sector in Aotearoa New Zealand. The possible interconnections of that work and academic work for social justice are explored.
Reclaiming Economies
Authors: Schwittay Anke
Published: May 2022

This chapter inspects what a critical-creative pedagogical approach to teaching social science students about economic challenges could look like. It presents the neoclassical orthodoxies against which demands for more pluralist and heterodox teaching have been made. The chapter particularly looks at how these alternative approaches can help students to understand the rethinking of mainstream economic principles forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter then turns to Bolivia's pluralist and solidarity economies to analyze how ethnographic accounts that ground economic theories in specific contexts can lead to experiential teaching. To extend this discussion to the imagining and building of diverse community economies, the chapter draws on J.K. Gibson-Graham's work of making visible, including in university classrooms, alter-and non-capitalist economies. The chapter elaborates on two teaching activities: in the first, students create personal diverse economy portfolios to resituate themselves as diverse economic subjects; the second is a collective exercise to design the plans for a recycling cooperative.
Capstones
Authors: Schwittay Anke
Published: May 2022

This chapter presents a proposal for several speculative capstone projects that show the potential of a critical-creative pedagogy informed by the knowledges, orientations and politics from all chapters writ large across universities. In formulating these projects, the chapter draws on arguments and activities from previous chapters as well as the literature cited throughout the book. It articulates these insights into thought-experiments that enact generative theorizing of new possibilities within expansive and participatory universities. The chapter then displays several examples of possible projects and initial ideas for how they could be undertaken. The following examples of possible projects are grouped into three broad themes of opening up learning, sustainable campuses and reimagining universities.
Introduction: The Many Different Faces of Nostalgia – Exploring a Multifaceted and Multidisciplinary Emotion
Authors: Jacobsen Michael Hviid
Published: May 2022

In this introductory chapter, the main purpose is to introduce the notion and emotion of nostalgia and to illustrate how it has developed within our culture ever since it was first conceived. The chapter distinguishes between ‘nostophiles’ and ‘nostophobics’ as well as shows how we live in an ‘age of nostalgia’. Moreover, we will trace nostalgia from its original roots to contemporary ideas within everyday life and politics. There will also be a focus on how the topic of nostalgia, previously far from a popular research theme, has experienced nothing less than a revival within social science and humanities studies and also within popular culture throughout the past decade. Finally, the introductory chapter will outline the purpose, structure and content of the volume.
Anthropology and Nostalgia: Between Hegemonic and Emancipatory Projections of the Past
Authors: Herzfeld Michael
Published: May 2022

Anthropological interest in nostalgia encapsulates numerous versions and a wide variety of (sometimes unexpected) contexts. Anthropologists themselves engage in a nostalgia, which sometimes takes the form of ‘salvage anthropology’. The political roots of this exoticising nostalgia are acutely embarrassing to a discipline determined to rid itself of the taint of its colonial and nationalistic origins. Awareness of such historical entailments, however, has also equipped the discipline with a critical and comparative perspective that is further enhanced by a distinctive insistence on experience-near, minutely observed, and contextually anchored ethnographic detail that is usually described in first-person narrative. The resulting focus, while empirically small-scale, permits wide-ranging cultural comparison. It especially enables a richly empirical apprehension of the role of agency and performativity in the genesis, production, and social and political impact of genuinely nostalgic discourses. These discourses should be carefully distinguished from the officially inspired, monumental representations of collective heritage intended to inspire the present. It is against such official practices that nostalgia – regret for lost cultural intimacy and the pained expression of present-day social failure – often arises.
Institutional Abuse in Ireland: Lessons from Magdalene Survivors and Legal Professionals
Authors: O’Rourke Maeve , O’Mahoney Jennifer , O’Donnell Katherine
Published: May 2022

The girls and women who were incarcerated in Ireland’s Magdalene institutions found themselves under lock and key due largely to perceptions that they were at risk of violating or had violated moral rather than legal codes. Their treatment was in many ways worse than the treatment of those imprisoned under the Irish criminal justice system; arbitrariness and exploitation were its hallmarks. Addressing the manifold injustices that occurred is still an on-going issue for groups such as Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR) and survivors themselves, and this chapter offers an introduction to the difficulties that the women face in seeking accountability and redress for the legal wrongs perpetrated by State and non-State actors. In particular, the chapter discusses the findings of a 24-month European research project in which the authors were involved, entitled SASCA (Support to Adult Survivors of Child Abuse in institutional settings).
Re-storying Offending Behaviour: A Normal Response to an Overdose of Trauma?
Authors: Mulcahy Jane
Published: May 2022

Drawing on qualitative interview data with twelve men approaching release from prison, I explore how childhood trauma is at the root of their offending, based on their personal backstories of neglect, abuse, family dysfunction, social deprivation and community adversity. Involvement in criminality is just one of many symptoms of interpersonal trauma and social exclusion. Wounded people with offending behaviour need to learn to feel safe in their own bodies and to regulate their emotions in healthy ways. If they are not assisted to heal, to locate their real, authentic selves underneath their (mal)adaptive coping strategies, to take joy in human relationships and find purpose in the world, further criminality is a virtual certainty. I argue that penal policy and practice must become aware of the impact of Adverse-Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and trauma-responsive as a matter of urgency. Unless and until all the various actors involved in crime prevention, prosecution, punishment and rehabilitation get to grips with the debilitating impact of developmental trauma and the adverse experience of class, little in the way of lasting positive change can be expected of traumatised offenders.
Reconsidering the 1991 Blackbird Leys Rioters as an Underclass: An Insider Perspective
Authors: Windle James
Published: May 2022

In 1991, a riot in Oxfords Blackbird Leys housing estate was documented in Campbell’s (1993) Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places. Campbell identified the rioters as belonging to an ‘underclass’ (p.29) of ‘marginal young men’ (p.34): excluded from education and work, and coming from single parent families. Similar narratives have dominated political and media discourse of subsequent riots, including the 2011 London riots. This chapter draws from my own experience of the riots and the rioters, as friends and colleagues, to argue that neither left- nor right-wing underclass explanations can explain the riots. I suggest that, drawing from draws from Robert Merton, Jack Katz and Elijah Anderson, the riots emerged from a combination of localised violent subcultures created by the strain of relative deprivation, and because riots are cleansing and present a release from the stress of relative deprivation augmented at a time of uncertainty. The chapter concludes by discussing how powerful voices, notably the media, misrepresented marginalised working class youths, and how the underclass theory can be challenged by a little insider knowledge.
Access Denied: Sex Worker Health and Well-Being in the Context of Criminalization
Authors: McGarry Kathryn , Ryan Paul , Berry Adeline , Guarani Belle
Published: May 2022

This chapter is based on findings from a study funded by HIV Ireland, in collaboration with the Sex Workers’ Alliance of Ireland (SWAI) focusing on the impact of the recent sex purchase ban on sex workers’ health and well-being in the Republic of Ireland. Through a participative framework, employing peer led focus groups, this study explores how sex workers in Ireland are navigating their health and well-being within a restrictive legal environment. This research positions sex workers as experts in their own lives, challenging dominant discourses which discredit sex workers’ realities when they trouble abolitionist frameworks. This chapter reports on key findings emerging from sex worker voices collected in this study including impacts of sex working laws on health, safety, well-being and access to justice and indicates recommendations for rights based and inclusive policy for sex workers.
Reforming Ireland’s Adversarial Trial for Victims of Crime with Intellectual Disabilities
Authors: Cusack Alan
Published: May 2022

Over the past three decades, Ireland's criminal justice landscape has undergone a 'victim revolution'. The enactment of the Victims' Charter, the recognition of a victim's limited right to separate legal representation and the introduction of Victim Impact Statements are emblematic of a concerted effort, not only to foster greater support for crime victims, but also to actively accommodate their increased participation in the Irish criminal process. Unsurprisingly, vulnerable victims of crime have not been immune to this inclusionary trend. Indeed as far back as 1992, Ireland's statute book has recognised a series of testimonial accommodations for vulnerable witnesses. A new chapter in this inclusionary tale commenced on 17 May 2018 with the signing into law of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017 (Commencement) (No. 2) Order 2018 and the Criminal Justice (Victims of Crime) Act 2017 (Commencement) Order 2018. By interrogating these newly-commenced instruments in light of the experience of crime victims with intellectual disabilities, this chapter will survey the current procedural landscape governing the treatment of vulnerable crime victims in Ireland and will go some way, it is hoped, to exposing the embedded evidential barriers which continue to prejudice efforts aimed at securing their best evidence in court.
Syria: ‘There Was No Benghazi To Be Saved’
Authors: Rees Morgan T.
Published: May 2022

This chapter traces the types of ideas which led President Barack Obama to repress principled arguments for intervention in Syria. Obama's aversion to foreign intervention re-emerged after the US intervention in Libya. Despite initial suggestions of a ‘red line’ on the use of chemical weapons and having his ‘finger on the trigger’, he repressed principled calls for intervention in Syria after large-scale chemical weapons attacks occurred in the suburbs of the Ghouta region in 2013. The attacks killed over 1,400 people, many of whom were non-combatants. The chapter argues that Obama framed the crisis in legalistic terms, regarding the international taboo on the use of chemical weapons rather than as a humanitarian atrocity, given the lack of a ‘Benghazi to be saved’.
Energy Securitization and the Private Sector: The Case of BP
Authors: Ganz Aurora
Published: May 2022

This chapter analyses the role of BP in providing security and exposes the privatized dimension of energy securitization. It situates energy security in discourses and practices of security that are defined ontologically and politically by private property. This chapter shows that energy securitization embodies and diffuses neoliberal principles, such as autonomy, efficiency and privatization, creating a legitimate space for energy companies and private security contractors to provide security services. In the case of BP, energy securitization and neoliberalism interlace in a particular way, whereby security enlarges private profits. Its main arguments indicate that the neoliberal propensity towards the maximization of profits reinforces security as securitization.
Democratic Finance, Then and Now
Authors: Davis Mark , Davis Bruce
Published: May 2022

Chapter three traces the history of crowdfunding back to ancient Athens, offering insights into the relationship between the birth of democracy and finance, including how moments of crisis have led to the renewal of both. Here, we also examine how our beliefs about money, and our readiness to trust other people with our money, are rooted in a constant interplay between individual self-reliance and shared social responsibilities that plays a role in politics as much in ancient Athens as it does today.
Advancing the Research Agenda on Local Territorial Reforms: Taking Time and Space Seriously
Authors: Tavares António F.
Published: May 2022

This chapter reflects upon the contributions of Paweł Swianiewicz’s work to the scholarly debate on territorial reforms. Three major contributions are highlighted: 1) the integrated discussion of inter-municipal cooperation and amalgamation reforms; 2) the joint study of amalgamation and de-amalgamation processes; and 3) the increased role played by sub-municipal units government in urban governance. The chapter proceeds by stressing how this comparative work coming out of Central and Eastern European countries has interacted with other European scholarship leading to a more productive and fruitful research agenda. The chapter closes by underscoring the importance of time and space to advance this agenda on territorial reforms.
One Size Does Not Fit All: Growing Cities and Shrinking Towns in the Spanish Local Map
Authors: Navarro Carmen , Pano Esther
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores the main features of the Spanish local system and the implications of a fragmented and unbalanced municipal map composed by few a wide number of small villages and a few big cities. Despite the enormous differences between these two worlds, big and small municipalities, the regulation governing their functioning is relatively uniform. It diversifies some aspects by population thresholds, but these different regulations do not always suit municipalities’ realities and needs. The chapter analyses the dimensions affected: the electoral system, tasks and functions, institutional organisation and financial system and aspires at highlighting the main complexities and also the mechanisms of the resilient municipal system to adapt to this rigid architecture.