bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Social Work with the Black African Diaspora
Authors: Marovatsanga Washington , Garrett Paul Michael
Published: January 2023

Social work education and interventions with Black African families are frequently impaired because of discrimination, racism and the structuring priorities of neoliberalism. Rooted in rich and fascinating empirical work with practitioners and educators, this urgent, scholarly and accessible book emphasises that ‘Black Lives Matter’. Intent on nurturing more progressive and pluralistic practices in pedagogy and practice, the book is a timely and significant contribution seeking to remake social work approaches to issues of ‘race’, racism and social justice.
Introduction
Authors: Marovatsanga Washington , Garrett Paul Michael
Published: January 2023

This chapter concisely identifies the book’s core concerns and places them in the context of issues relating to, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement and COVID-19. The main argument is that social work practice and education needs to do more to address meaningfully issues relating to the Black African diaspora. The authors’ attention is specifically on the Republic of Ireland, but the book has global resonance for social work and those intent on developing social justice-orientated approaches. ‘Reflection and talk boxes’ are used at the end of each chapter to promote reflection, discussion and activism.
Social Policy in the Shadow of the Pandemic
Authors: Jolly Andy , Cefalo Ruggero , Pomati Marco
Published: January 2023

Experts review the leading social policy scholarship from the past year in this comprehensive volume. Published in association with the Social Policy Association, the latest volume in this long-running series addresses current issues and critical debates throughout the international social policy field with a particular focus on employment policy, housing policy and climate justice. Contributors also explore key developments including researching during the COVID-19 pandemic, migrants’ access to social benefits in Germany, the right(s) to healthcare in Italy, American and European homelessness policies and much more. This annual review is essential reading for students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.
Critical perspectives on social work and social policy practice with vulnerable migrants in an era of emergencies
Authors: Scherf Erick da Luz
Published: January 2023

Pandemics, climate change and economic crises are all drivers of migration, both internally and transnationally. On top of these socio-environmental emergencies, vulnerable migrants often face institutional violence, social welfare exclusion and the enduring effects of colonisation and global inequality. However, the Eurocentric and Western social work curricula have mainly focused on clinical practice – with the ‘individual client’ being the main recipient of welfare services – and failed to properly address the structural challenges posed by colonialism and global capitalist expansion, which may reproduce inequalities and pose obstacles to radical social transformation. To create effective social change, social workers must engage in social policy practice and politics. There is an urgent need to decolonise Social Work, which means not only incorporating postcolonial theory and approaches into the profession but questioning and calling out the reproduction of colonial practices through welfare and social assistance programmes. This chapter engages with social work practice with vulnerable and/or marginalised migrants and explores critical voices in the fields of social work and human rights to address the long-lasting effects of colonisation and capitalist oppression in times of social, environmental and health emergencies. The chapter urges social workers to understand the effects of colonisation when working with vulnerable migrants.
When activation policies deactivate jobseekers: inconsistencies in French integration policy
Authors: Lusinchi Adrien
Published: January 2023

Since the 1990s, the OECD and EU have fostered activation policies in the struggle against unemployment. Two regimes have been identified as archetypes of the activation policies: the social democrat regime (Northern European model) and the liberal regime (Anglo-Saxon model). Within the liberal archetype, activation policies focus on incentives to work (making work pay), preventing dependence on public assistance and making employment a policy priority (work first). The social democrat archetype puts together sanctions and services for job seekers, employees and in-care citizens in a contractual framework, fosters flexibility while highly socialising its risks, and provides high substitute revenues and high life-long learning.
Introduction
Authors: Davis Juliet
Published: January 2023

This book sets out to consider the potential of urban design in terms of care in cities. It is concerned with how urban design supports the diverse inhabitants of cities in meeting their needs and developing capabilities, enabling them to thrive and flourish into the future. It is also concerned with the role of urban design with respect to care practices and relations – with its potential to condition the dependencies of people on others, to foster patterns of interdependence, and to enact care for future generations. For a long time, the potential of design with regard to care or caring was principally explored through particular spaces associated, for example, with the care of children, the elderly, refugees, homeless people, disabled people and the sick. The result is a rich and still rapidly growing corpus of studies of typologies of care-centred architecture – from the hospitals, hospices, historical asylums and day centres of healthcare, to the nurseries and schools of childcare, to the residential settings of care in families and communities
Placing Care
Authors: Davis Juliet
Published: January 2023

The project in question here, as described by its designer, the architect Stephen Witherford, is conceptualized as an “almshouse for the twenty-first century”. Located on a high street in the inner-city neighbourhood of Bermondsey, South London, it provides housing for around ninety elderly people. Designed to be open and, to an extent, continuous with the public spaces and social interactions of the high street rather than merely as an object building contained and defended within the boundaries of its site, it has been conceived by the practice Witherford Watson Mann as a node in a complex network of caring practices, relationships and spaces that extend out into the surrounding neighbourhood and beyond. As such, it exemplifies a trend in the design of eldercare in the UK, as in many other nations globally, involving the development of what are termed deinstitutional models of care in place of traditional models within bounded institutional settings. These new models encompass varied combinations of formal care services and informal types of care made available to people living outside of traditional institutions such as nursing homes. They pertain to a wide array of spaces too, from the long-term family home where someone may wish to age-in-place, to day care centres where people may go for a few hours to receive particular forms of support beyond the home, to residential accommodation such as the almshouse where people may live relatively independently but with help, services and resources close at hand.
Accessibility in/as Caring
Authors: Davis Juliet
Published: January 2023

I began to allude to the importance of accessibility in facilitating new patterns of care in the previous chapter, and the goal of this chapter is to consider in depth how urban design can mobilize notions of access to influence care needs, relations and practices. However, I begin the discussion with a quandary since two of the major goals of accessibility as constructed in the context of urban design theory have an uneasy relationship with the ideas of care and from the ethics of care which I have presented thus far. The first of these goals is personal autonomy. The accessibility of built form is often seen to shape the autonomy that people such as those with a mobility or sensory impairment have in looking after themselves and choosing how and where to live. The second goal is universality. The goal of accessible urban design, such as within the context of ‘universal design’ discourses, is seen to be the creation of city forms and places that are navigable by all, satisfying principles of inclusivity and equity (see, for example, Steinfeld and Maisel, 2012).
A Public Sociology of Waste
Authors: Hird Myra J.
Published: January 2023

Our planet is filling up with waste: plastics permeate our oceans, incinerators create hazardous waste and dumps are surpassing capacity. A Public Sociology of Waste critically examines how public sociology might usefully engage in debates concerning our global waste crisis. The book argues that public sociology is well placed to shape future deliberations concerned with our waste maker global society because it is uniquely positioned to move deliberations from downstream responses to much more challenging upstream issues. This reframing of waste is only achievable by engaging with various publics in ways that illuminate the relations between waste and wider societal issues concerned with over-production and over-consumption, poverty, racism, sexism and social justice. As such, the book’s main contribution is to provide detailed empirical studies that detail how publics currently engage, and are engaged by, waste but also how publics might transform the framing of waste problems and their solutions.
Topologies Of The RIGHT HERE , Not yet , And OVER
Authors: Walker Margath A.
Published: January 2023

In later years, Marcuse focused on unrealized potentialities, and the possibilities of imaginative fantasy. I expand the radical potential of Marcuse’s formulation through two concrete examples: Wikipedia and Aztlán. Chapter 4 draws on Eros and Civilization and Marcuse’s other mature works to elaborate a topological understanding of utopia. Topology, with its language of folding and openness, jolts us out of the ‘is’ into multiple planes of plenitude. The approach described in this chapter – a triadic topology – translates Marcuse’s utopia as right here, not yet, and over and has direct relevance for notions of oppositional space and prefigurative politics.
Becoming a Young Organic Farmer in the Indian Punjab
Authors: Brown Trent
Published: January 2023

Across the global south, there are growing concerns of a ‘youth exodus’ from agriculture. In response, governments, civil society and the corporate sector have launched programmes to encourage youth participation in agriculture, which chiefly focus on making farming more ‘aspirational’. Yet, this ‘aspirations’ focus individualizes agriculture’s generation programme in a way that is not appropriate in the global south. Drawing on a study of youth enrolled in two organic farming training programmes in Punjab, India, this chapter shows that young people’s decisions to remain in agriculture were informed by a range of social and geographically contingent factors that were often outside of their control. Less important than individual aspirations were peer-group dynamics, local job market prospects, regionally salient discourses about agriculture and environment, and the ways agriculture featured within their families’ long-term mobility strategies.
Youth Transitions and Spatiality: The Case of a Deprived Coastal Town in the UK
Authors: Wenham Aniela
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores what it is like to grow up in a deprived coastal town, illustrating how these particular places have distinctive social structures, webs of relationships and cultural meanings attached to them. Highlighting the distinctiveness of geographical place, the chapter draws upon ethnography, participatory arts-based research and semi-structured interviews with young people who live in a deprived coastal town in the North of England. This research draws attention to the importance of place in shaping young people’s identities and aspirations and how the subjective meanings associated with class are ‘lived out’ and made sense of differently. The contribution of this work is that it allows us to explore young people’s lives spatially, and in particular how the spatial concentration of inequalities impact upon the experience of youth and the patterning of youth transitions.
Accountability Reconceived
Authors: Kirton-Darling Edward
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines the rise of the modern form of the inquest, arguing that it was a jurisdiction in which the diminishing role of the community left an understanding of the inquest as a jurisdiction with a limited expert medico-legal role. It analyses the role of notification of family and legal devices aimed at enabling their participation, and, drawing on jurisprudential analysis of the conceptual underpinnings of the legal concept of jurisdiction, argues these can be understood as technologies of jurisdiction – legal devices which produce jurisdiction. It considers the way in which Article 2 ECHR has impacted on inquest law and argues that it can be seen to have produced a new form of the inquest – the contemporary inquest – in which family have moved from assistants to the Coroner in a limited inquiry to essential participants who are involved as of right.
Dignity, the Family and the Body
Authors: Kirton-Darling Edward
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on decisions relating to the body of the deceased, and the role that family are understood to play in relation to those decisions and the body itself. These decisions include questions about post-mortems and about who should be entitled to receive the body when the inquest system no longer needs it, and raise particular questions relating to different religious and cultural approaches to the body. It argues that these questions are understood as questions of dignity, but that dignity can take different forms. To examine this, drawing on jurisprudential scholarship, it analyses approaches to dignity in relation to exhumation, and differentiates between an approach based on civility and an understanding based on conscience. It argues that these two frames correspond to those framings discussed in Chapter 4 and uses these conceptual frames to explore the empirical data.
The Public(?) Hearing
Authors: Kirton-Darling Edward
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines the ways in which interviewees understand the family’s engagement with the construction of the public space of the inquest hearing. It argues that reforms have produced a hearing which can be substantively more or less public in terms of what is covered and who is there to listen, and the family play a central role in determining how it is shaped. To explore this issue, it examines the different spaces in which inquests take place, before exploring order, disorder and the role of lawyers. It then discusses the ways in which the hearing can be more or less public in more detail, before concluding with a focus on the emphasis of meaningfulness in both the hearing and conclusions of the inquest
Central Europe: Half-Truths and Facts
Authors: Kalmar Ivan
Published: January 2023

This chapter fact-checks, by citing a wide variety of mostly quantitative data, common prejudices and misconceptions about Central Europe. They include the notion that democracy has failed there, that corruption and crime are much greater than in the West, or that emigration has created a demographic disaster.When comparing Central, Western, and Eastern Europe, best results are achieved by carefully differentiating between the large cities and the rural areas of each region. On many measures, the big cities of Central Europe resemble the West; the rural areas of the West resemble Central Europe.The overall picture that emerges is that many things that are commonly assumed about ‘Eastern Europe’ are false or at best half-truths. Central Europe is located on many political, economic, and cultural measures somewhere between the West and the rest of Eastern Europe (such as the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia), but typically closer to the West. The inclusion of the area in a generalized ‘Eastern Europe’ is due more to prior expectations than to verifiable fact.
Religion and Capitalism
Authors: Jeremy David J.
Published: January 2023

Belief in the non-material world and accountability to God potentially endowed the religious mind with dissentient perspectives on capitalism. This chapter examines the proposition that religion has significantly shaped modern capitalism. The first part spans global interactions between the two phenomena, in Asia and the Middle East; and then at a firm level, in the West. The second part traces crucial interactions between religion and capitalism in the West: in the European origins of modern capitalism and in Britain’s pioneering industrial revolution. A hostile religious reaction to capitalism might have been expected in response to the odious institution of slavery. In fact, collisions and collusions occurred, with religious motivations predominating in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. The overall verdict is that a fair survey of the development of modern capitalism must include a role for the negative and positive effects of religion.
Introduction: Towards a Critical Renewal of the Sociology of Mental Health
Authors: Brossard Baptiste , Chandler Amy
Published: January 2023

What is the sociology of mental health concerned with? This introductory chapter proposes that sociology, despite its reluctance to employ the lexicon of causality, is well equipped to analyse the processes through which mental health and illness are socially produced. To do so, however, the sociology of mental health might now be better understood as general sociology, since understandings and explanations for mental illness permeate all aspects of social life. This chapter outlines how explanations for mental health incorporate: stratification and inequality; labelling of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour; the ups and downs of embodied, emotional life; and the cultural meanings and shape of all of these. Sociology has the tools to explain mental illness, and doing so requires an understanding of mental illness as embedded in social, cultural and political life.
The Weight of Labels
Authors: Brossard Baptiste , Chandler Amy
Published: January 2023

Mental disorders are worded, interpreted in context, and these idioms can and do change, shaping the realities they describe. In short, categories and diagnoses have a generative power. But what power exactly? What is the weight of labels? This chapter begins in the 1960s, presenting Thomas Scheff’s labelling theory of mental disorder and Michel Foucault’s approach to madness and the Western self. The chapter then turns to subsequent perspectives that took less speculative and therefore narrower lenses, examining labelling processes and devices through medicalization, daily categorizations, and stigma. Finally, some avenues for contemporary research are outlined: the socio-political arrangements at the core of label production, the performativity of categories and the ‘function’ of labels in social organization.
Drilling Down on Globalization: Performance Indicators and Rankings as Features of Multi-Level Governance
Authors: Verheijen Tony , Staroňová Katarína , Elghandour Ibrahim , Lefebvre Anne-Lucie
Published: January 2023

The first dimension of globalization discussed is the global push for performance, which is driven by rankings and ratings on global performance indicators related to economic governance. The chapter examines, through a vignette-based research method, how civil servants respond to global performance pressures. The response typology set out in Chapter 1 was tested in this way on this first critical dimension of globalization. The review of evidence emerging from the literature and from in-depth interviews with senior officials shows a general adherence to the principle of performance and competition (on global indicators), and a growing interest in evidence-based policy making among civil servants. Improved performance on global indicators is associated with the public and national interest. On this basis, a more professional and engaged civil service type is emerging in most of the focus countries, and in some cases, rebel behaviour is also observed.
Deepening Engagement With International Development Institutions: Impact on Civil Servants
Authors: Verheijen Tony , Staroňová Katarína , Elghandour Ibrahim , Lefebvre Anne-Lucie
Published: January 2023

The theme of this chapter is the deepening engagement between international institutions and the countries of the MENA region, and whether and how this translates to growing socialization of international norms and principles among civil servants. Using a blend of vignettes and traditional interviews, the impact on the process of professionalization of civil servants was also examined. Deepening direct engagement with international actors influences civil servants and contributes to their professionalization. The broadened and deepened contacts between civil servants and international actors hence have a visible impact. However, while civil servants strongly value these direct relations, they remain loyal to national systems and institutions, especially when it comes to decisions that concern the internal management of their institutions. On this dimension of globalization, we therefore see evidence of greater professionalization (moving from the traditional to the professional civil servant), but limited indications that this will lead to civil servants allying with global actors to drive reforms and change.
A Narrative Exposition of British Colonial Rule in the Americas
Authors: Tomlin-Kräftner Melsia
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses a compressed version of Britain’s colonial slavery beginnings in the Americas, and why British society eventually became a melting-pot of people from the Caribbean. This exploration through an intersectional lens, and applying a constructivist epistemological position, with a narrative, interpretive approach, showcases condensed journeys in the periods of the British triangular slave trade in African people to the Americas, and the melting-pot of diasporic people developed from the influx of varied nations into the Americas. The journeys then follow the exodus of families from the Caribbean to North America and Europe for economic reasons, especially those who returned to Britain during the Windrush era. Intersectionality is applied in this period of study as a way of understanding and analysing the complex and diverse intersecting factors that shaped and influenced the macro environmental conditions of social, political and gender constructs that impacted the whole colonial society. The discussions highlight the significance of intersectional criminal injustices along the lines of gender, class, race and colour enforced on black and mixed-heritage people during slavery and extended to the Windrush period through to the diasporic societies of present-day Great Britain.
Young Men’s Perspectives on Child Criminal Exploitation and Their Involvement in County Lines Drug Dealing: An Intersectional Analysis
Authors: Marshall Hannah
Published: January 2023

This chapter uses an intersectional approach to explore the perspectives of young men based in one English county, who were involved in county lines drug distribution, and who had been identified by the professionals in their lives as potential victims of child criminal exploitation. Drawing on observations and semi-structured interviews, this chapter engages with intersectional scholarship to develop two key themes. Firstly, it conveys young men’s descriptions of their involvement in county lines as shaped by intersecting pressures of economic hardship and their expectations of their familial roles. Secondly, the chapter engages with the ways in which young men’s conceptualizations of their involvement in county lines, specifically, their rejection of the term ‘victim of exploitation’ and identification with the idea of involvement as a ‘constrained choice’, were informed by intersecting experiences of masculinity, socioeconomic marginalization and working-class identity.
Managed Brothel Workers
Authors: Mulvihill Natasha
Published: January 2023

This chapter presents extended narratives from two managed brothel sex workers working in England and Wales, formerly and currently, as well as short excerpts from interviews with other participants. Topics covered include autonomy, harm, managing the law and hopes for the future. It also explores the impact of COVID-19 and on the experience of participating in academic and government research.
This Island’s Mine: University Teaching as Inclusive Dramaturgy
Authors: Braverman Danny
Published: January 2023

Despite an abundance of schemes in higher education, disabled students experience disadvantage. In general, the academy takes its lead from equality legislation and establishes specialist teams to address ‘access’, placing access plans and agreements at the heart of disabled students’ experiences. This chapter problematises this approach with reference to critical disability studies. Through a detailed description of a workshop run by the author on post-colonialism and The Tempest, new ways of working are examined. He proposes that the achievement of excellent teaching for all can mirror the best inclusive theatre practice, where access is built-in rather than bolted on.
Whom We Cite: A Reflection on the Limits and Potentials of Critical Citation Practices
Authors: Schmidt Januschka
Published: January 2023

Practical discussions of “inclusive” research methods in (Western) academia focus on key issues such as which layers of power control and maintain the favoured types of knowledges and knowledge production and how these layers exclude or destroy other types. How are contemporary citation practices contributing to and obscuring these inequalities? How can critical research methods help make academia and research more inclusive? Which kind of difficulties might new scholars encounter when applying critical research methods in research and how can they deal with these? This chapter explores these questions with an eye toward offering new and emerging scholars practical solutions for using critical research methods, for considering the potentials and limitations of Open Access publications, and for interpreting traditionally ‘canonical’ voices through a critical lens.
Dealing with the Westernisation of Chinese Higher Education: Evidence from a Social Science Department
Authors: Bolzonar Fabio
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses the Westernisation of social theory in contemporary China. Based on the author’s experience as a researcher and lecturer at Fudan University, it provides insights on the Eurocentrism of Chinese sociology and suggests some actions to foster greater epistemic pluralism. Pedagogical practices have a central role in reproducing this Eurocentrism, just as social theory plays a central role in sociology at large. This chapter helps us understand how top Chinese universities interact with the Western knowledge towards which they show great openness.
Resources and Their Effect on Feminist Resistance
Authors: Perheentupa Inna
Published: January 2023

In this chapter the author brings together the main threads of resistance in its manifold forms and the resources on which it draws, and defines the ‘resourceful feminist’. Some key issues are uncovered relating to the movement’s internal struggles, and whether solidarity between the different schools of feminism might be strategically useful. The author also observes the role of the internet and its ambivalence in allowing individuals to engage with feminism while also helping to produce hierarchy inside the movement. Furthermore, contributions connected with challenging the hegemony of Western feminism, and construing more local and context-specific feminism(s) are discussed. In the final part of the book the author turns to look at more recent developments connected with feminist activism in Russia, and new limitations targeted at independent activists in this context.
The Future for Rural Criminology: Transcendence and Transformation of Borders
Authors: Harkness Matt , Bowden Joseph F.
Published: January 2023

This chapter contemplates the past, present and future of rural criminology, considering its transformation from a niche area of interest in the criminological field, oft overlooked, to what has become a burgeoning subdiscipline in its own right with an enviable growth trajectory. It reflects on the chance encounters that have brought together scholars and others from disparate academic spaces and geographic places to study rural crime. In so doing, it considers the notion of borders in a globalised world, the role and importance of networks, rural criminology as public criminology. The chapter contemplates what the future might hold, and recommends several actions to facilitate its advancement well into the twenty-first century. Even in a globalised world, both physical and intangible borders persist. Sometimes these borders can be glaringly obvious, some are curious, and others are controversial and contentious both historically and now. Borders also serve as metaphors for the divisions imposed in the academy. The chapter muses on how rural criminology provides an effective crossing of our own boundaries, and in the process how it has created an inclusive and dynamic space for research, scholarship and practice.
Not Learning from Mistakes
Authors: Brooks Thom
Published: January 2023

This chapter considers the second edition of the ‘Life in the UK’ citizenship test in 2007. Its purpose was to help correct the errors and other problems arising from the first edition in 2005. However, what the chapter uncovers is that lessons were not learned and problems became more acute. By the time a follow-up edition was published, it was possible to take a full test of questions from this second edition where every correct answer had become outdated and no longer factually true.
Conclusion and Recommendations
Authors: Brooks Thom
Published: January 2023

This chapter provides a summary of conclusions arising from the previous six chapters. This final chapter provides a list of 20 recommendations for implementation by government. These recommendations would help ensure the test better fulfilled its original aims and purposes.
Refugees, Self-reliance, Development
Authors: Easton-Calabria Evan
Published: January 2023

The promotion of refugee self-reliance is evident today, yet its history remains largely unexplored, with good practices and longstanding issues often missed. Through archival and contemporary evidence, this book documents a century of little-known efforts to foster refugee self-reliance, including the economic, political, and social motives driving this assistance. It explores how self-reliance programming for refugees has largely occurred through development projects that have treated refugees as workers in need of employment, as well as humanitarian subjects.
With five case studies from Greece, Tanzania, Pakistan, Uganda, and Egypt, the book tracks refugee self-reliance as a malleable concept used to pursue ulterior interests, including nation-building, Cold War alliances, and the restructuring of national economies. The book’s findings reshape understandings of refugee self-reliance, and deliver important messages for contemporary policymaking and practice.
Introduction: Why Refugee Self-Reliance?
Authors: Easton-Calabria Evan
Published: January 2023

This chapter introduces the concept of refugee self-reliance through a discussion of its current usage in contemporary policy and practice and an overview of literature on the subject in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies and Development Studies. It presents an overview of the book and the concept of instrumentalization, and provides a brief chronology of changing understandings of self-reliance in relation to humanitarianism, development, conflict, and nation-building in the 20th and 21st centuries. The chapter concludes with the book’s main findings and arguments, notably how refugee self-reliance assistance has changed over the last century, and the implications of this for refugee protection today.
Socialism and Self-Reliance: Refugee Self-Reliance Assistance in Post-Colonial East Africa
Authors: Easton-Calabria Evan
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines the nature of refugee self-reliance assistance within the post-war ‘development project’ in Tanzania following the wars of decolonization in the 1960s. The promotion of collective refugee self-reliance in East African settlements through mono-crop cultivation for national export is presented in relation to wider development policies at the time, which focused on domestic production and international economic participation to achieve mass well-being. Refugees’ economic value is examined through the growing of cash crops for both subsistence and export as part of Tanzanian President Nyerere’s African Socialist national development efforts. Thus, refugees contributed to the so-called ‘development project’ through participating in a variety of programmes led by both national actors and international ones such as the World Bank. Evidence explores the ulterior aims of refugee self-reliance assistance at the time as related to the international economy and premised on the promise of modernization.
Global Production Networks: Diversification or Reshoring?
Authors: Nölke Andreas
Published: January 2023

The coronavirus crisis has demonstrated the vulnerability of global value chains in a very forceful way. This includes staff that is important for the operations of these networks not being allowed to cross borders, international air travel strongly being reduced, health checks delaying border crossings and increasing political skepticism about free trade. Correspondingly, companies and governments are seeking for ways to reduce this vulnerability in the future. However, this does not mean that we are necessarily heading towards an isolationist international production system where each country tries to manufacture as much as possible in country. It rather implies that the configuration of global production networks and domestic production systems will be adjusted gradually in order to increase their robustness, at least for crucial goods as in the medical sector. The over-reliance on national competitive advantages, extreme specialization, just-in-time production and highly complex global production networks turned the system very vulnerable to various sorts of instabilities. The more complex these networks are the more likely is an interruption. Post-coronavirus capitalism will see some reshoring (or at least nearshoring) of production, in order to reduce instabilities.
Trade Policy: Liberalism or Protectionism?
Authors: Nölke Andreas
Published: January 2023

Although we cannot predict how far the process will go, the coronavirus pandemic undoubtedly has led to a wave of protectionist measures. Who could have imagined the imposition of export controls even between European economies? Globally, the initial trade policy reaction to the coronavirus pandemic was even more protectionist than after the Global Financial Crisis. Moreover, these measures were initiated in a context that already had become very protectionist. Particularly the US-China trade war had weakened the liberal trade agenda already before 2020. In a more systematic perspective, the coronavirus pandemic has met an international trade system that has seen a decade of norm erosion, norm evasion and norm abuse in the international trade regime. Correspondingly, the handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the Global North will strengthen the case for protectionist trade policies in the South. Many countries have learned that they cannot rely on the trade liberalization gospel preached by Northern governments and the international organizations dominated by the latter. Increasingly this looks like a fair weather policy that is pushed aside if vital interests are at stake.
Global Health Governance: Intergovernmental or Private–Public Networks?
Authors: Nölke Andreas
Published: January 2023

The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that money spent on the prevention of communicable diseases is money well spent, not only from the perspective of countries in the Global South. Moreover, it has become obvious that the current set-up of global health governance is not fully functional. We did not see much activity on the global pooling of expertise and joint development of vaccines during the early phase of the pandemic. Instead, in order to increase the availability of protection against the coronavirus, many governments have banned exports of relevant material. The World Health Organization not only was unable to prevent these contra-productive practices, but also generally is paralyzed between the Global North and the South. Moreover, its authority has increasingly been eroded by numerous private actors and public-private partnerships. Post-corona capitalism will have to put up with a rather dysfunctional system of global health governance.
EU Economic Governance: Erosion or Integration?
Authors: Nölke Andreas
Published: January 2023

The balance with regard to European integration during the coronavirus pandemic is mixed. European integration was particularly limited in the original phase of the crisis when each Member State only looked after the health protection of its own citizens. European integration worked much better during the second phase — short-term macro-economic stabilization — when the European Central Bank prevented a major economic crisis without much delay. The third phase of the pandemic, with a focus on the compensation of companies and workers for lockdown policies, rather speaks in favor of disintegration, given the extremely different abilities of EU Member States to support national companies. Finally, during the fourth phase, we are witnessing a clear measure of integration, with the temporary doubling of the EU level budget via the Next Generation EU fund. Given this wild ride, it is difficult to say whether post-coronavirus capitalism will see a more or less integrated European Union. It very much depends on the measure applied: if the focus is on institutional change, the creation of new agencies and budgets speaks in favour of integration. If the focus is on an equitable development throughout Europe and on harmonious relations between European societies, the assessment is negative.
Liberal or Organized Capitalism?
Authors: Nölke Andreas
Published: January 2023

When we understand the recent history of capitalism as a pendulum movement between liberal and organized phases of capitalism, a new phase of organized capitalism currently looks far more likely than a stabilization of liberal capitalism. The coronavirus crisis has contributed to a fundamental crisis of liberal capitalism. At the same time, we are witnessing various indications for a rise of organized features of capitalism. Correspondingly, we may assume a more prominent economic role of the state in many economies in post-coronavirus capitalism. This entails a larger importance not only in terms of spending, but also in the control of companies and the steering of markets.
Music As Method
Authors: Levell Jade
Published: January 2023

This chapter outlines the methodological approach of music elicitation. Participants were asked to bring three music tracks that helped them tell their life stories. These tracks functioned in different ways: as an anchor to memories, as a narrative tool, and as a communication aid. Ultimately, the use of song lyrics and music videos helped create a participatory model that forged a bridge of understanding between the researcher and participant.
‘a man’/‘The Man’
Authors: Levell Jade
Published: January 2023

In this chapter, the developments in the participants’ masculine biographies are discussed in relation to their adolescence. This was the period of their most significant engagement with on-road and gang-involved life. The participants’ narratives are analysed to identify the various ways in which they adopted a protest masculinity defined by marginalization and attempts to redress the powerlessness that they felt in younger childhood. There were two distinct ways the participants spoke about themselves with regard to masculinity as something culturally achieved. These were though the discourse of being or becoming ‘a man’ and being/becoming ‘The Man’. In this chapter the author explores in more depth the portrayal of both becoming ‘a man’ and ‘The Man’ and what this reveals about the types of masculinity, as well as those gendered behaviours that were most revered on-road.
The Road Ahead
Authors: Levell Jade
Published: January 2023

This chapter is concerned with the participants’ lives after being on-road and gang-involved. In varying ways, they all went through a process of disillusionment with protest masculinity and this began a period of reflection and rebuilding of their masculine identities. The ways in which power relations changed among the men at the stage of recovery was centred on them talking about how they gave up the power that the protest masculinity performance had afforded. Their perspective on their power changed when looking back on their lives retrospectively. Part of their desistance journey was seeking alternative role models for work and family life, as well as adopting new codes of morality, through religion, to achieve a new sense of masculinity. However, their experiences of trying to fit in with wider society from a position of being (in many cases), ex-prisoners, with criminal records, and difficult habits, led them to occupy a marginalized masculinity upon exit for the most part.
Care and the Pluriverse
Authors: FitzGerald Maggie
Published: January 2023

This book begins with the concept of the pluriverse – the idea that we do not live in a single world with different belief systems, paradigms, or cultures, but instead live in a world of many worlds – and investigates the ways in which this notion necessitates a rethinking of the field of Global Ethics. In particular, the book considers how the field can reorient itself towards building an ethics for the pluriverse, where differences are deep and pervasive, and where different ways of being and knowing are at stake. Ultimately, drawing upon a feminist ethics of care, this book argues that a pluriversal ethics can fruitfully be thought of as an ethics of vulnerability and precarity. The ethics of care is premised on a relational social ontology, which sees ethics as a problem of responsibilities in relations, and which foregrounds the moral saliency of our mutual vulnerability (including the vulnerability of moral judgement) that stems from our relationality. In so doing, the ethics of care reconceptualizes moral dilemmas along relational lines. The argument is that this line of thinking, when combined with a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and precarity (where precarity refers to intensified vulnerability that results from unequal relations of power), provides a useful meta-theoretical orientation from which to begin building a pluriversal ethics.
Vulnerable and Precarious Worlds: A Meta-Theoretical Orientation
Authors: FitzGerald Maggie
Published: January 2023

Chapter 6 presents a care ethical meta-theoretical framework for contemplating ethical horizons in the pluriverse. Using the ethics of care, this chapter mobilizes a distinction between vulnerability, understood as an inherent ontological condition of subjects who are embedded in relations of dependency, and precarity, which is defined as intensified vulnerability resulting from unequal distributions of power that render certain subjects more or less vulnerable than others. This chapter then develops and mobilizes this understanding of vulnerability and precarity so as to demonstrate how this lens allows us to consider the explicit effects of global material and ideational hierarchies of power on particular worlds, and the configuration of the pluriverse more generally. This framing, it is suggested, redefines ethics in the image of the pluriverse, and foregrounds the ways in which particular ethical dilemmas in the pluriverse always take place within a broader horizon of precarity, whereby certain worlds are rendered ‘more’ or ‘less’ vulnerable than others in and through the processes of ethical deliberation between and amongst worlds.
Rethinking Global Ethics with Care and the Pluriverse
Authors: FitzGerald Maggie
Published: January 2023

Finally, Chapter 9 returns to the field of Global Ethics and offers some concluding thoughts on what the preceding discussion means for researching and doing global ethics in and for the pluriverse. Specifically, this chapter reiterates that binary thinking is an insufficient theoretical space from which to contemplate and build pluriversal ethics. Instead, the pluriverse pulls us into an alternative conceptual space, a space of complex relations upon relations, which enact (sometimes radically) different knowings/beings while paradoxically tying them together. Further, research, theories, and various practices – as implicated in the reproduction of worlds – will produce and sustain unique relations and distinct forms of moral life. Scholars and practitioners in the field of Global Ethics must therefore take responsibility for that which our theorizing alternatively (re)produces and disrupts. More simply, we must care about the consequences, that is, the worlding effects, of the ways in which we think and do global ethics.
Social Movements And International Relations
Authors: Anderl Felix
Published: January 2023

Combining social movement studies and IR holds a promise for both disciplines: overcoming the formalistic emphasis on institutions in IR and the institutional blind spot in social movement studies. This chapter introduces a view on movements and institutions in interaction. It discusses some of the difficulties encountered in studying institutional movement ‘outcomes’ and surveys the ways in which IR has already incorporated some important concepts from the contentious politics approach, notably in the literature on contestation and politicization. Outlining some of the weaknesses in these concepts, the chapter offers the analytical framework of rule and resistance in an interactionist research program, namely the reconstruction of transnational rule from the analysis of resistance.
Uncontentious Politics? The Civil Society Policy Forum
Authors: Anderl Felix
Published: January 2023

The World Bank Group and the IMF have created a number of fora that enable ‘civil society’ to participate in the governance of development. This chapter ethnographically investigates the interaction of World Bank Group/IMF staff with critics at the Civil Society Policy Forum in 2016, the most prominent forum of interaction. It describes observations from panel sessions that illustrate the back-and-forth of arguments and highlight the specific ways in which critique can and cannot be issued. Especially pertinent, it seems, is the frustration of some advocates and the disarming air of institutional representatives in light of which the critics are unsure what to reply. The institutions have professionalized their dealing with critics in accordance with the mechanisms of complex rule.
Fragmentation in Cooperation: Observing the Changing Practices of Critique
Authors: Anderl Felix
Published: January 2023

This chapter describes the mutual critique and incrimination of different parts of ‘civil society’, specifically highlighting the processes of hierarchization and fragmentation that occur during the process of participation. It shows that the process of fragmentation, alongside the mechanisms of complex rule, is still ongoing among the already fragmented group of critics. The chapter describes these processes based on ethnographic observation in one specific session of the Civil Society Policy Forum and the ensuing discussions about it, in which these practices became especially visible: the so called ‘townhall meeting’ with participation of Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the IMF, and Jim Yong Kim, Director of the World Bank Group in 2016.