bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Neighbourhood planning and the purposes and practices of localism
Authors: Brownill Sue
Published: January 2022

This chapter situates neighbourhood planning within the context of the evolution of community-led planning, citizen engagement, and the shifting scales of spatial planning at the national and international levels. It critically examines neighbourhood planning as a key element of the localism that has evolved in England since 2010, outlining the contradictory propositions and powers at its heart. The chapter begins by exploring international trends in planning policy and governance and ways of characterising and understanding these, arguing for the need to move away from dichotomies to look at the complexities of the social, spatial, and political relations involved. It then looks at the localism and the neighbourhood planning initiatives of recent UK governments in the context of these debates. Finally, the chapter highlights the counter-narratives, tensions, and challenges that are revealed and which are examined in later chapters in the book.
Cities and integrated urban challenges
Authors: Dixon Timothy J. , Tewdwr-Jones Mark
Published: January 2022

The main concepts and understanding of cities and their meaning and definition are explored. The growth and origins of cities are discussed, and this is supported by statistics and data covering the size and type of city in the UK and internationally. Firstly this chapter explores how cities may be formally defined (spatially and temporally, for example), and what cities represent in terms of their inherent characteristics; is a city a ‘process’ or set of ‘processes’ for example, or an ‘object’, or a ‘system’? The challenges and opportunities for a range of cities now, and in the future, are compared with those from the past. This chapter covers the forces for changes that have driven and are driving city visioning activities and urban foresight as part of this wider agenda. The overall nature and characteristics of these challenges is then explored, and the extent to which they interlink and cross-cut the city and city-region scale and beyond. This will also require new ways of thinking and planning for the future, and what is termed ‘city visioning’ will be an important part of this process. Finally, the chapter examines how urban policy and practice has responded and needs to evolve to meet these different challenges.
Reimagining the city: views of the future from the past and present
Authors: Dixon Timothy J. , Tewdwr-Jones Mark
Published: January 2022

This chapter traces the origins of visions and defines them. Drawing on history, art, culture and academic thinking the development of city visions if traced from its earliest origins to the present day. Imaginary representations of cities are explored and described and critically reviewed. This chapter examines what is meant by the term ‘vision’ and how writers such as Plato and Thomas More have influenced our thinking about the future, through their utopian ideas. The chapter then compares and contrasts utopian and dystopian views of the future, drawing on literature and film (and related art) to examine questions such as what sort of ‘urban imaginaries’ emerge from literature and film, and do these imaginaries shape the way our cities look and feel today (and will do in the future), and vice versa? Finally, the way in which utopian thinking has influenced and shaped urban planning through the visionary thinking of early thinkers such as Geddes, Howard and others is examined.
Future narratives for the city: smart and sustainable?
Authors: Dixon Timothy J. , Tewdwr-Jones Mark
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses and analyses how cities can be typified and conceptualised in terms of their ‘ideal’ characteristics. To do this, the chapter examine how new theories, such as actor network theory (ANT) and ‘urban assemblage’ theory, can help inform our thinking about cities. The emergence of sustainable cities and smart cities ic critically reviewed before looking at the concept of ‘smart and sustainable cities’, and why visions lie at the heart of ‘urban futures’. Ultimately, it is argued that, if we are to re-imagine the future of our cities and create a solid basis for exploring and developing ‘urban futures’-based thinking, part of that process requires the co-production of coherent, participatory city visions that recognise the innate value of a place’s character, and the needs of the people that live, work and play there.
Shaping the future: city vision case studies
Authors: Dixon Timothy J. , Tewdwr-Jones Mark
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on a range of UK and international examples to highlight best practice in city visioning processes. To do this the chapter begins by tracing the evolution of city visions, and the distinctions we should draw between them, and masterplans. The chapter also examines the evolution of city visions over time and look at some specific examples highlighting the linkages between the process of visioning and the development of strategic urban planning. The quadruple helix framework is crucial to understanding how universities, government, civil society and universities can work together to create long-term city visions. Finally, the chapter examines two very different examples of city visions where foresight has played a major role (Reading 2050 and Newcastle City Futures 2065); what makes a ‘good vision’; and the opportunities and challenges surrounding the development of city visions.
The innovative and experimental city
Authors: Dixon Timothy J. , Tewdwr-Jones Mark
Published: January 2022

Innovation and experimentation is also at the heart of how a managed transition to a sustainable future can be influenced and shaped with a series of planned and strategic projects which can, for example, also underpin a vision of the city as ‘smart and sustainable’. The role of a university in the city and its engagement in a ‘civic role’ has also been highlighted as fundamentally important not only in economic growth theory and innovation theory, but also in city visioning literature. In this chapter, the importance of cities as centres for urban innovation and urban experiments is examined, before looking at some of the most important spaces which have developed in cities for those activities, including innovation districts, living labs, urban rooms and science shops. The concept of place-based leadership and the role of the university in visioning, experimentation and innovation, are analysed before examining a detailed case study of urban innovation and civic engagement at Newcastle University.
Visioning and planning the city in an urban age: a reality check
Authors: Dixon Timothy J. , Tewdwr-Jones Mark
Published: January 2022

Visions are useful and valuable for their ability to contribute to democratic debate about appropriate directions forward; visions may have been much more directorial in past times than is called for today, but they do allow us to make sense of where we are and where we would like to be, even if the route to that destination is uncertain. As both city governments and urban planning powers have diminished, at least in the global north, and branded as unfashionable for the twenty first century, questions remain about the usefulness of city visioning for planning, in a context where a multitude of organisations, sometimes in harmony but often fragmented, shape and reshape the city. This chapter examines the changing shape of cities, their complexity and transformational changes. It sets out the case for the development of city visions and for urban planning to be seen and utilised as a stock of knowledge and methods that can assist cities in assessing and managing both present day challenges, and carve out paths for the future.
Reflections on the decolonising dance praxis of Grupo Bayano
Authors: Darder Antonia , Cronin Sharon
Published: January 2022

The chapter explores the work of a Seattle-based community-based cultural performing group, Grupo Bayano, who for more than 40 years has employed the music and dances of U.S. Caribbean communities to work with teachers of young children, young people, and community members. The group enacts communal dance as a decolonizing praxis grounded in the cultural histories, values, sensibilities, and lived experiences of subaltern communities, in an effort to challenge domestication and create learning conditions that counter experiences of racism, sexism, and other forms of inequalities in the lives of bicultural students and their communities. The analysis draws on scholarship that examines a critical pedagogical reading of the body and dance as a liberatory educational practice.
Muralism, disputes and imaginaries of community resistance: case studies from settlements in Santiago de Chile and Rio de Janeiro
Authors: Cortés Alexis , Menezes Palloma , Mano Apoena
Published: January 2022

How do popular communities self-represent and engage in resistance against unfavourable situations? This chapter explores the relationship between visual artistic experiences of popular sectors, their disputes in and about the community, and the possibilities of activating imaginaries of community resistance. In so doing, it draws on two experiences: the political muralism of the población (shantytown) La Victoria in Santiago de Chile, an emblematic neighbourhood known for its organized takeover of land (1957) and for its resistance against the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1989); and the murals and graffiti produced by the inhabitants of the Favela Santa Marta, the shantytown-laboratory of the pacification process (2008) that preceded the sports mega-events in Rio de Janeiro. We highlight how both neighbourhoods are exemplars in terms of their paths of struggle, and in terms of being epicentres for popular occupation strategies that have been fundamental to the configuration of both cities. Muralism, in this way, appears not only as an indigenous form of expression of and by the community, but also as an aesthetic space or form that reflects ongoing disputes about what should be portrayed as reflecting that community.
Living Wages and the Welfare State
Authors: Wilson Shaun
Published: January 2022

Living Wages and the Welfare State documents and analyses a key transition now underway in the Anglo-American social model. Although minimum wages are increasing across the world, recent mobilisations for living wages represents a major challenge to the policy consensus of the Anglo-American model in place now for several decades. That consensus promoted adjustments to globalisation and technology by promoting a lean workfare model, maximising dependence on deregulated private labour markets held in place by low minimum wage floors. Growing problems with poor employment quality and low pay, combined with mean and over-policed systems of social protection, have created new pressures on institutions governing the social aspects of employment. Worker activism and a broad net of progressive policymakers have been energised by the broad popular appeal popularity of living wage claims. These reforms have been bolstered by a new political economy of labour markets casting doubt on over-confident claims of inevitable job losses from wage justice for low wage workers. At the same time, major pressure on social protection systems transformed by workfare and mean benefits have forced justice claims into the sphere of low-wage employment. In defending the value of higher and universal minimum wage floors, this book is wary of the limits of minimum wage reforms and explores how the liberal model might be realistically converted into a living wage welfare state. The author argues that living wages represents a realistic and popular platform for beginning a long struggle against rising inequality and disrespect for workers.
Conclusion: living wages and liberal welfare states in the 21st century
Authors: Wilson Shaun
Published: January 2022

The Conclusion makes the case for a living wage welfare state, building on the analysis, evidence, and argument of the previous chapters. It distinguishes a minimal reform strategy based on narrow improvements in the wage floor from a broader reform program aimed at building living wage foundations that are realistic and suitable to the structures, power resources, and institutions of liberal welfare states. In doing so, it makes a distinction between conservative-liberal, social-liberal, and living wages models for transforming liberal welfare and employment structures to reduce inequalities and improve working class lives. At the same time, the book strongly endorses a greater role for social scientists in debates and research about low wage workers and encourages social policy analysts to re-engage with the emerging situation in overextended and liberalised labour markets.
Sex/Gender and Self-Determination
Authors: Davy Zowie
Published: January 2022

This book considers key personal, political and pedagogical approaches to trans, sex/gender expansive and intersex people in various policy fields such as sex/gender recognition legislation, medical diagnoses, medical interventions and educational policies. The book also contemplates how self-determination relates to sex/gender, transitions and expressions, and how it corresponds to current debates around binary sex/gender embodiment. The relevant human and non-human qualities that are addressed throughout the book are not analyzed in relation to someone’s or something’s inherent nature but demonstrated to be desired and then produced in specific assemblages. These assemblages of becoming-human and becoming-social are constituted by looking to the immediate pasts, present contexts, and potential future directions of being able to self-determine sex/gender within the different policy domains. The book then is a commentary on ethical relationships. My approach to sex/gender self-determination shows how a variety of human and non-human forces are enrolled in moralizing and thus denigrating the promotion of ethical frameworks that impact inequitably on trans, sex/gender expansive, intersex people and cis people. The book suggests that any truly ethical policy and engagement with it must acknowledge these relationships through a ‘nomadic ethics’ framework. Drawing on the Deleuzian concepts of assemblage, affect and desire this book takes you on a journey of interconnected trajectories of human and non-human bodies and personal, political and pedagogical policies.
Concluding remarks
Authors: Davy Zowie
Published: January 2022

This section draws the main arguments together around the gender self-determination framework and how it plays out in the different sites considered in the book.
Data and the solidification of ability
Authors: Bradbury Alice
Published: January 2022

Chapter 5 discusses datafication, defined as an increase in the prominence and importance of data in schools, with an impact on practice, values and subjectivities. The different elements are described here as the Five Ps of datafication: relating to pedagogy, practices, priorities, people and power. It is argued that one result of datafication is that much of what teachers do is geared towards producing the right data, particularly in relation to demonstrating progress. The chapter explains how this has been fed by policy which reifies progress measures and an inspection regime which relies on data analysis. The chapter goes on to explore data-based ability practices – the use of data to label and classify children into different levels or stages, which are then taken to be indicative of levels of ‘ability’. Research data on the significance of progress measures as systems which reduce children to data are explained. It is argued that data have a disciplinary function and that data and ability as discursive formations are co-reliant: data shows ability, and different abilities produce the data. They are also both based on principle of objective measurement as the best means to understand the child as learner.
‘Live like a college student’: student loan debt and the college experience
Authors: Goerisch Denise
Published: January 2022

In this chapter, Denise Goerisch’s explores how processes of neoliberalisation and austerity result in profound forms of strain, tension and anxiety for many young people. The chapter explores the transformative impacts of educational neoliberalisation and austerian budget cuts in North American Higher Education, particularly emphasising the proliferation of student debt. Through ethnographic research with students at a Wisconsin college the chapter charts some of the troubling, complex ways in which debt has come to be closely entangled with many young people’s lives, at the same time that sources of support for indebted students have been significantly dis-invested. The chapter suggests that experiences of debt pervade practically every aspect of young people’s experiences, homes, education and family lives. However, the chapter also shows how media and political discourses about student debt in the USA remain wedded to an idealised, rosy imaginary of student lifestyles, plus aspirational expectations of students as future workers/consumers, overlooking young people’s own, present-day experiences as ‘indebted subjects’.
‘Everywhere feels like home’: transnational neoliberal subjects negotiating the future
Authors: Boampong Michael
Published: January 2022

In this chapter, Michael Boampong explores how neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises have reshaped families and households in diverse and uneven ways. Through research with British-Ghanaian young adults, the chapter considers the ambivalent and unequal impacts of migration and labour market policies in the wake of the global financial crisis and decades of transformative neoliberalisations. The chapter shows that experiences of British-Ghanaian families differ markedly depending on their economic and social capital, with wealthier families experiencing unprecedented freedoms whilst other less wealthy British-Ghanaian families increasingly experience profound constraints, barriers and marginality within migration and social care contexts. The chapter argues that these polarised experiences each require young people to ‘do family’ in new ways, setting in motion new kinds of transnational flows of migrants, capital and ideas.
Learning to pay: the financialisation of childhood
Authors: Walker Carl , Squires Peter , Goldsmith Carlie
Published: January 2022

In this chapter, Carl Walker, Peter Squires and Carlie Goldsmith explore how the everyday lives of young people intersect with the instrumentalised, commercial imperatives of for-profit financial institutions. The chapter presents an analysis of recent UK financial education tools produced by financial institutions for young people. In so doing, the chapter explores how ‘financialisation’ has become a taken-for-granted, everyday part of many young people’s lives. The chapter argues that neoliberalised financial institutions seek to craft financialised subjectivities through increasingly sophisticated pedagogic practices and interventions in educational policies and school curricula. The chapter thus suggests a need for more careful and critical understandings of the interfaces between young people’s everyday lives and financial services, institutions, money, credit and debt.
Immigration, employment precarity and masculinity in Filipino-Canadian families
Authors: Kelly Philip
Published: January 2022

In this chapter, Philip Kelly explores how Filipino-Canadian families’ experiences of precarity intersect with gendered, and particularly masculinist, norms and inequalities. Reporting new findings from a major study of Filipino youth transitions in Canada, the chapter explores how Filipino-Canadian young people’s lives are framed by gendered disparities in intergenerational social (im)mobility. The chapter notes that normative trends in social reproduction (whereby university-educated parents typically support degree-gaining children) do not seem to apply for many Filipino-Canadian families. Instead, the chapter shows how Filipino-Canadian families are distinctively shaped by gendered impacts of foreign worker programmes in Canada. Through this analysis, the chapter draws attention to the often-overlooked intersectional impacts of masculinities for migrant families’ lives and experiences.
Looking towards the future: intersectionalities of race, class and place in young Colombians’ lives
Authors: Marzi Sonja
Published: January 2022

In this chapter, Sonja Marzi considers the ambivalent, complex aspirations of young, urban Colombians in Cartagena. The chapter shows how young people’s aspirations are profoundly constrained by intersecting inequalities relating to class, race, gender and neo-colonial structural inequalities. However, despite these inequalities and exclusions, the chapter shows how young people demonstrate creative ways of sustaining hopes and constituting opportunities for social mobility. The chapter tracks these ambivalences through evocative accounts of independence day celebrations and beauty pageants. The chapter argues that care is needed to critique commonplace assumptions that many young people ‘lack aspirations’ and that their social immobility is a consequence of this lack. Instead, the chapter shows how young people manage to carve out aspirational opportunities for aspirational social mobility despite countervailing structural barriers. Nevertheless, the chapter shows how young people’s everyday lives and hopes are profoundly affected by pervasive inequalities and discrimination on bases of race, class, gender and neo-colonial inequalities.
‘If you think about the future you are just troubling yourself’: uncertain futures among caregiving and non-caregiving youth in Zambia
Authors: Day Caroline
Published: January 2022

In this chapter, Caroline Day considers the role of aspiration among caregiving and non-caregiving young people in Zambia. The chapter notes that youth-centred policy-making is relatively new and under-developed in Zambia, as in many other contexts. The chapter argues that better understanding of young people’s aspirations and senses of the future is crucial in formulating and policies and programmes that support, or impact upon, young people. Drawing on qualitative research, the chapter explores the nature of the future aspirations of diverse, and often extremely marginalised, Zambian young people. The chapter shows how, even in profoundly hard times, these young people’s aspirations were rarely selfish and individualised: instead, they overwhelmingly talked about aspirations in terms of caring relationships and responsibilities. Their aspirations are full of care and love: for family members, friends, communities and older and young people.
Heterosexual sex, love and intimacy in later life: what have older women got to say?
Authors: Hafford-Letchfield Trish
Published: January 2022

The current epistemology of heterosexuality, love and intimacy in later life has highlighted how older women’s sexual desire and sexual expression has been subject to highly gendered socio-cultural restrictions, an emphasis on relationship status and problematisation of physical health. This chapter reviews some themes on heterosexual desire and sexual expression in later life within the context of socio-cultural and health-related factors. By drawing on several sources, this chapter considers how gender norms and performativity pertinent to existing heterosexual women’s sexuality are impacted by external and internalised stigma that accompanies ageing and/or are made complex in situations where health is affected. Concepts of agency and power are used to challenge the side-lining of women’s desires and bodies in relation to sexual functioning.
Thinking the unthinkable: older lesbians, sex and violence
Authors: Todd Megan
Published: January 2022

Hegemonic narratives about intimate lives impact on the recognition of sexual violence. Current generations of older lesbians have experienced profound social changes over the course of their lives. Many were the vanguard of cultural and social sexual change, shaping the transformation of what it means to experience ageing and sexuality. Despite such shifts, the intersections of ageism, heterosexism and sexism impact on their lives in various and complex ways, frequently rendering them invisible culturally and socially. Thus, older lesbians experience an unfortunate paradox, living in a time of an increasingly sexualised society, a time when arguably it is easier to be gay. Yet, they also live in a society where they are told that their sexuality is distasteful. In addition, as older members of the LGBT+ community - a commercialised, youth-orientated community - many older lesbians feel marginalised, reeling from the impact of homonormativity. Interviews from ESRC-funded research into community responses to lesbian domestic violence, reveal that cultural stereotypes about gender, sexuality and age determine whose sexual story is listened to and the types of stories heard.
Introduction to volume two: themes, issues and chapter synopses
Authors: Simpson Paul , Reynolds Paul , Hafford-Letchfield Trish
Published: January 2022

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the volume in various ways. It outlines the political and scholarly context of ageing sexuality, whereby the subject itself is imbued with negativity and constraint, while elaborating the purpose of the volume: to bring a critical to the ways in which and why older people encounter their sexuality as something made problematic. The chapter also describes the contours and various forms of desexualisation as preparatory to a summary of the contents on each chapter and the order or chapters from the general to the particular and ending with chapters devoted to care policy and practice.
‘At YOUR age???!!!’: the constraints of ageist erotophobia on older people’s sexual and intimate relationships
Authors: Simpson Paul
Published: January 2022

Older people’s attempts to express sexuality/intimacy are commonly met with ridicule, disbelief and infantilization. Such a process has been identified as ‘ageist erotophobia’ (Simpson et al 2018). This chapter demonstrates how ageist erotophobia is implicated in relational constraints on the expression of sexuality and intimacy in later life at three ‘levels’ that contribute to desexualisation. These concern the macro-level social relations of ageism which also influence thought/practice at the meso-level of care homes and everyday micro-level interpersonal relations. The concluding section briefly draws attention to how older people can avoid or challenge ageist erotophobia.
Menopause and the ‘menoboom’1: how older women are desexualised by culture
Authors: Anderson Clare
Published: January 2022

The cultural and subjective gazes continue to characterise the process of female ageing as one of loss, in which the female body is both desexualised and degendered. This chapter explores the relationship between these two deeply problematic concepts, drawing on a public menopause discourse from the lifestyle media and the growing sub-genre of semi-autobiographical mid-life narratives. It compares these public voices with the private voices of a group of women’s individual accounts of the menopause, taken from a series of qualitative interviews. The draws on age theorist Margaret Gullette’s contention that the menopause is culturally constructed, that the profusion of menopause discourses (‘the menoboom’ 1997: 98) artificially conflates menopause with inevitable decline, creating a single narrative of loss: of physical strength, of emotional stability, and of sexual attractiveness. The chapter concludes that the notion of an older female body which can still be sexual remains too challenging for the narrow ideological, visual and linguistic repertoire of a prevailing culture.
Before the market
Authors: Hudson Bob
Published: January 2022

Chapter 1 describes and examines the pre-market era in ‘social services’: the Victorian interventions and their ongoing influence; the post-1945 era in which state provision was shaped by the 1948 National Assistance Act; and the brief ascendancy of state-run provision in the wake of the 1968 Seebohm Report and the 1970 Local Authority Social Services Act.
Dilemmas in the commissioning of adult social care
Authors: Hudson Bob
Published: January 2022

Chapter 3 looks at dilemmas in commissioning. Now that the ‘purchaser-provider split’ is entrenched, what judgement can we make of how well commissioning has lived up to expectations? How is the concept being understood and interpreted? What are its strengths and weaknesses?
Forgotten Wives
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: January 2022

Forgotten Wives examines the ways in which the institution and status of marriage has contributed to the active ‘disremembering’ of women’s achievements. Drawing on archives, biographies, autobiographies and historical accounts, the book interrogates conventions of history and biography writing to show how assumptions about marriage and women help to write women out of history. The book uses the case-studies of four women who were active in social and educational reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and were married to well-known men: Charlotte Shaw (née Payne-Townshend), Mary Booth (née Macaulay), Jeannette Tawney (née Beveridge) and Janet Beveridge (known previously as Jessy Mair). The case-studies demonstrate how independently-performing women disappear as supporters of their husbands’ work, as secretaries and research assistants, and as managers of men’s domestic lives. Even intellectual collaboration tends to be portrayed as normative wifely behaviour rather than as joint work. Forgotten Wives asks critical questions about the mechanisms that maintain gender inequality, and it contributes a fresh vision of how the welfare state developed in the early twentieth century.
Mary Booth
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: January 2022

Mary Macaulay, the grand-daughter of the abolitionist reformer Zachary Macaulay, married the shipowner and social reformer Charles Booth in 1871. She was a significant contributor to Charles Booth’s landmark 17-volume study of Life and Labour of the People in London. She also brought up 7 children, managed the Booths’ domestic and social lives, and sponsored a range of welfare projects in the community.
Jeannette Tawney
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: January 2022

Jeannette Beveridge, the sister of welfare state architect William Beveridge, married the socialist historian R. H. Tawney in 1909. Thereafter her life as a factory inspector, historian and writer, is dwarfed in historical accounts by her role as Tawney’s wife. The way in which she is castigated for being a poor housewife illustrates the assumptions commonly made about marriage and gender.
A life of her own
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: January 2022

This chapter draws together the threads of the four case-studies. Its focus on how conventions of biography- and history-writing downplay women’s work and lives leads to an examination of methodology. The chapter argues that a failure to consider issues such as bias and subjective viewpoints has helped to drive the forgetting and mis-remembering of married women’s lives and work. Briefly discussing other famous wives – Harriet Taylor Mill, Sofia Tolstoy, Anna Dostoevsky, Marić Einstein, Alice Elgar and Rose Beuret – Forgotten Wives concludes by arguing that the tradition of burying wives’ separate identities is alive and well today.
Paradigm lost? Blocking the path to ecosocial welfare and post-productivism
Authors: Fitzpatrick Tony
Published: January 2022

This chapter starts by defining an ecosocial agenda and presents post-productivism as one instance of this. It claims the synergies between social and environmental policies have barely registered to date. The chapter finds the familiar oppositions between those who favour remaining close to existing socioeconomic models, that is pro-productivism (based on GDP growth, production and consumption, and so on) and those for whom environmentalism and the ecosocial implies a greater, transformative potential. While the diminishing public sphere is again a major cause for concern here, the chapter offers some hope, by encouraging us to think less in terms of oppositions between pro-productivists and post-productivists, and more in terms of commonalities and overlaps. The struggle for sustainability is clearly evident but only by seeking alliances and common ground, as the chapter suggests, may we begin to take some of the necessary steps to resolve the social and ecological problems and challenges now facing humanity.
Global social policy and the quasi-concept of social cohesion
Authors: Jenson Jane
Published: January 2022

This chapter spotlights intersectionality and intersectional analysis–considering global social policy making and the quasi-concept of social cohesion. It is a quasi-concept, as the chapter argues, not least because no shared definition of social cohesion actually exists in the literature. But also, importantly, because of the way it is used empirically by policy makers, while at the same time remaining sufficiently flexible to be deployed by policymakers in policy instruments, at different levels, and within and across different spatial scales. The chapter also investigates and compares the work and policy approaches of the international institutions: the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Health Organization, as well as the work of regional actors like the EU. It ultimately argues that the concern for cohesive social relations during crisis and change continues to motivate both actions and analysis of institutions and actors now intervening at several scales, including global social policy.
Working within frames and across boundaries in core group meetings in child protection
Authors: Hall Christopher , Slembrouck Stef
Published: January 2022

The chapter describes how information sharing and multi-agency coordination is established as a central concern of child protection policy and procedure in England. It looks at Core Group Meetings as the ‘control room’ of multi-agency work. The analysis draws on framing and boundary work to explore how professionals from different agencies contribute to multi-agency meetings and examines the activities of the chair in terms of framing turns and topics. It demonstrates how different professionals ensure that their presence is established in the meeting. The conclusion is that managing professional contributions involves complex boundary work by all participants.
Sympathy and micropolitics in return-to-work meetings
Authors: Bülow Pia H. , Wilińska Monika
Published: January 2022

The chapter examines multi-agency return-to work meetings within the Swedish social insurance system by applying the concepts of sympathy and sympathizing to explore emotions and micropolitics in meetings concerning work ability. It demonstrates how sympathizing becomes an integral part of the institutional frame and illuminates how the institutional actors step outside their specific meeting roles to sympathize with the service user drawing on the concept of footing. Furthermore, it discusses the changes in the formal meeting structure when the process of sympathizing coincides with alliances.
The Byker Community Trust and the ‘Byker Approach’
Authors: Pendlebury John , Haley Jill
Published: January 2022

The Byker Estate, Newcastle upon Tyne, is one of greatest achievements of its age in public housing anywhere in the world. The Council’s ownership was transferred to the Byker Community Trust (BCT) Housing Association in 2012, following a unanimous vote by residents. Subsequently BCT has embarked on an ambitious programme of physical renewal. However, the biggest challenge Byker faces is not the condition of its buildings or public spaces but the impact of deep-seated poverty and deprivation, exacerbated by austerity and welfare reform. This chapter focuses upon the efforts of the Byker Community Trust to develop the ‘Byker Approach’, which gives tenants a key voice and role in decision making, influence in service provision and standards and maximises access for local people into employment, training, health and educational opportunities. Central to this process is building trust, empowering both staff and residents and building closer working relationships.
Cafe society: transforming community through quiet activism and reciprocity
Authors: Midgley Jane , Slatcher Sam
Published: January 2022

This chapter is about food sharing, specifically the social and economic interactions and transformations generated through the daily activities of a pay-as-you-feel community café. The café worked with intercepted surplus food and was based in a north east of England market town. The chapter is informed by Young’s (1997) idea of asymmetrical reciprocity which recognises difference and diversity of experience with the possibility that this brings people into new and different social, economic, material and political relations. Participatory research with a small group of café regulars identified and documented: reciprocity as finding expressions of valuing both the food and understanding others, the transformation in individual’s lives regarding food insecurity and social interaction, and the ‘quiet’ politics and activism (after Askins, 2015) concerning food security and food waste that the café’s food sharing practise had generated.
Drive to thrive: a place-based approach to tackling poverty in Gateshead
Authors: Steer Mel , Walker Michael
Published: January 2022

English local authorities experienced large, enduring funding cuts during austerity as the UK government sought to reduce public sector debt after it saved UK banks from collapse in the global economic recession of 2008. In response to austerity and to increasing levels of poverty and disadvantage in the local authority area, this chapter describes how Gateshead council endeavoured to develop partnership, place-based working with multiple partners to support its communities. It outlines the development of ‘Thriving for All - Tackling Poverty in Gateshead’, a place-based, collaborative approach that aimed to target resources to people and communities most in need and whose priorities included activities to alleviate fuel and food poverty. The chapter reflects on the challenges of austerity and place-based working and how place-based working may contribute to social renewal and social justice.
The good, the bad and the disconcerting: a week in the life of university project-based learning for schools
Authors: Leat David , Thomas Ulrike , Hayward Kirsty , de A’Echevarria Anne
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores the potential for localised project-based learning (PBL) to transform educational outcomes by offering meaning to students. The first section describes the deadening effect of a National Curriculum accompanied by high stakes assessment, followed by the evolution of the PBL work, based on principles of ‘community curriculum making’ and brokerage. A theoretical contextualisation of the project is provided through the concept of the Learning City. The description and analysis of one ‘pop up’ project on health illustrates the potential, the pitfalls, and the critical issues in the current educational system, which include the issue of ‘boundary crossing’ for young people. It concludes with urgent lessons for universities in widening participation work and argues the case for ‘local learning ecologies’ being developed to address social justice.
Citizen power, the university and the North East
Authors: Bryson Sara , Todd Liz
Published: January 2022

This chapter explores community organising through the first four years of the Citizens alliance in North East England and the role of the civic university in the alliance. The university provided principal funding, strategic leadership (students and staff leading a number of action groups) and research particularly on poverty, mental health and Islamophobia. There have been many successful actions in achieving real living wage, addressing hate crime, and improving mental health provision although of course structural poverty and racism have not been solved. Citizens requires training, is a particular approach but through co-production many staff and students have played active indeed leading roles. Citizens has provided university students and researchers with a powerful form of action learning and a vehicle for relationship building across the institution. This continued during Covid-19 lockdown due to existing relationships and use of technology. This move towards a politics and social contract that prioritises social justice though community organising is now critical.
Disability and Ageing
Authors: Leahy Ann
Published: January 2022

The book explores how older people experience physical or sensory disability, taking a critical approach to gerontology. It also draws on critical disability studies, aspects of medical sociology and lifecourse studies. The book is informed by an empirical study with two groups rarely considered together in empirical or theoretical work – people first experiencing disability with ageing and people ageing with long-standing disability. Despite the fact that older people experiencing impairment are rarely considered ‘disabled’, the book shows that study participants could feel disabled by a range of factors including inaccessible environments and disablist interactions with others, as is the experience of disabled people generally. Often experienced in combination with losses of intimates, this can represent a challenge to a sense of value and meaning in life. Older people can also respond dynamically, engaging in challenging processes of interpretation and reinterpretation that are underappreciated in dominant understandings of later life lived with disability as a residual category encompassed in concepts such as ‘fourth age’. The book argues that the extent to which constructions of ageing and of disability, and the social devaluation of each, are intertwined and linked to fears of human vulnerability means that these issues would benefit from approaches that address them across the life span. It points to areas of scholarship offering potential for conversations across the fields of ageing and disability, arguing for an engagement with disability in older age as a personal, embodied, social, cultural, political and socio-economic phenomenon.
Defining disability
Authors: Leahy Ann
Published: January 2022

This Chapter discusses how disability is understood and how separate models are used to understand what disability is generally and to understand what it is in older age. The Chapter considers understandings within approaches to disability, involving social and cultural models, and biopsychosocial or interactional models. It then discusses definitions that dominate approaches to ageing, which are largely biomedical and that, even within sociological approaches, are informed by concepts based on the medical model such as the ‘fourth age’ or ‘frailty.’ It argues that biopsychosocial or interactional approaches, which inform international approaches to human rights, are potentially valuable for opening discussions between the fields of ageing and disability. Applying interactional approaches within gerontology would be a step forwards in terms of how disability is approached, offering the potential to apprehend disability as more than a personal problem.
Public policies on ageing and disability
Authors: Leahy Ann
Published: January 2022

This Chapter discusses the separation of public policy frameworks on ageing and on disability and the consequences for older people, focusing on social care. Public policies traditionally underscore difference between people with different timings of disability onset, operating as if people were disabled or older, not both. This separately constructs ‘disability’ experienced at different points of the lifespan. The Chapter first outlines disability prevalence linked to ageing and discuses traditional approaches to policies on ageing and on disability. It then moves to the consequences of the traditional separation between these two policy frameworks for older people. The Chapter goes on to address attempts to bridge the two fields in practice and finishes by suggesting lessons that can be drawn by those attempting to find a way forward in this area.
Voices from the Silent Cradles
Authors: Neagu Mariela
Published: January 2022

Shortly after the Berlin Wall came down and after the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the United Nations, images of malnourished children in institutions in Romania were broadcast by international media. They showed inhumane conditions in which children were living in residential institutions in Romania. Those visiting the institutions were surprised that the babies were silent. The so-called Romanian orphans made headlines for many years to come and they became subjects of several international research studies. To become a member of the European Union, Romania had to reform its child protection system. This book sheds light on the lived experiences of those born around 1990. Their childhoods were subject to successive reforms and sometimes divergent external influences. Most of them became adults around 2007 when the country joined the EU. Uniquely, the book brings together the accounts of those who stayed in institutions, those who grew up in foster care and those adopted, in Romania and internationally. Their narratives challenge stereotypes about these types of care.
Romania: what underlay the orphan crisis
Authors: Neagu Mariela
Published: January 2022

How did the orphanage crisis in Romania occur? This chapter is shedding light on how Romania’s child protection system evolved during communism, prior to the collapse of the regime in December 1989. It then provides a clear description of the chaotic 1990s, a decade characterised by foreign charities, unregulated intercountry adoptions and a compliant new state aiming to join the values of the West. It describes reform stages, the research and international media interest which institutionalised children in Romania. It points out the contradiction between different perspectives in relation to how children in care should be protected.
Childhoods in care
Authors: Neagu Mariela
Published: January 2022

This chapter introduces the study: how the young people in the study were identified and their childhood journeys growing up in different types of care. The memories of entering care and their childhood memories in children’s homes, in foster care or in adoption are aided by many powerful quotes. Importantly, the chapter includes a visual graphic that is indicative of each individual journey. This is a useful tool not only in understanding the findings of the study but also in challenging personal biases. It tackles children’s social identities in school and their attempts to gain knowledge about their birth families.