I Tyler
Biographic Data
| ID | 17447 |
|---|---|
| NAME | I Tyler |
| GIVEN NAMES | I |
| FAMILY NAME | Tyler |
| SIGNATURE | TYLER I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4823-2404 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1206 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
A Licence to Kill: Necroeconomic Suffocation by Stealth and the Fight for Life
Three decades of austerity in the UK have seen the deterioration of the elemental infrastructures , those that provided a basic level of security for the population. In this article, we analyse the case of Awaab Ishak, who died (age two) when he suffocated from mould in his home in Rochdale, North‐West England. We investigate why and how this child was allowed to die in a rich Western European country with a welfare state, and how this case made …
Lancaster Back History Group: Anti-racist education after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests
Doing Anti-Racism. With Geraldine Onek and Jasmine Patel [Audio podcast episode]
How can education fight stigma and racism? Activists from Lancaster Black History Group, inspired by Black Lives Matter, talk with sociologist Imogen Tyler about being empowered by facing the past – and centring Black agency in British history. A conversation about community, hope and change
Apocalypse and change. With GP Andy Knox [Audio podcast episode]
Poverty and stigma, says author and GP Andy Knox, are making us sick. He tells Imogen Tyler about the burnout facing frontline staff caring for their communities, the power of humility and listening as anti-stigma practices, and why we shouldn’t mock being “woke”. In fact, it’s the way forward
Tattooing and Resistance. With Alice Bloch [Audio podcast episode]
Written on the body. Sociologist Alice Bloch on her work talking to people who’ve chosen to tattoo themselves with the number branded on their ancestors at Auschwitz. Plus: how stigmatising undocumented migrants might work for capitalism - but makes for unliveable lives
Poverty Emergency! With Helen Greatorex [Audio podcast episode]
Why is deep poverty becoming entrenched in the UK? And how has stigma played its part? Helen Greatorex of North Lancashire Citizens Advice tells Imogen Tyler what’s changed between “austerity” and now - and why we must resist the normalisation of poverty, staying outraged at each case
Why Stigma? With Michaela Benson [Audio podcast episode]
What’s missing from mainstream thinking on stigma? Activist scholar Imogen Tyler tells her friend and fellow sociologist Michaela Benson how her thinking on stigma has grown - and why it speaks to urgent issues of poverty, racism, migration and the growing “war on woke”
De la « décennie du moi » au « millénium du moi ». Une histoire culturelle du narcissisme aux États-Unis
Dans les critiques sociales et culturelles des quarante dernières années, l’affirmation selon lesquelles les cultures axées sur le consommateur et saturées de médias ont donné lieu à un « nouveau narcissisme » a été maintes fois reprise. Au sein des c ultural studies, ont récemment proliféré des analyses de la montée du narcissisme dans le contexte de la culture de consommation, de la culture des célébrités et de la croissance des nouveaux médias…
Shame on Us: The Political and Economic Use of Stigma
A radical new theory of the political function of stigma with which to better understand and resist the rise of authoritarian capitalism
The hieroglyphics of the border: Racial stigma in neoliberal Europe
In the summer of 2015, 1.5 million refugees arrived at Europe's borders. This article examines how and why this humanitarian crisis was transformed into a "racist crisis". It begins by recounting a highly publicized event in the Czech Republic which saw police forcibly removing hundreds of people from trains at midnight in the border town of Břeclav, before inking numbers on their arms and transporting them to detention centres. Thinking with thi…
Resituating Erving Goffman: From Stigma Power to Black Power
This article offers a critical re-reading of the understanding of stigma forged by the North American sociologist Erving Goffman in his influential Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). One of the most widely read and cited sociologists in history, Goffman was already famous when Stigma was published in 1963. His previous books were best-sellers and Stigma alone has sold an astonishing 800,000 copies in the 50 years since it…
Rethinking the sociology of stigma
Stigma is not a self-evident phenomenon but like all concepts has a history. The conceptual understanding of stigma which underpins most sociological research has its roots in the ground-breaking account penned by Erving Goffman in his best-selling book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). In the 50 years since its publication, Goffman's account of stigma has proved a productive concept, in terms of furthering research on s…
Lesbian brides: Post-queer popular culture
The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of lesbian representations in European and North American popular culture, particularly within television drama and broader celebrity culture. The abundance of “positive” and “ordinary” representations of lesbians is widely celebrated as signifying progress in queer struggles for social equality. Yet, as this article details, the terms of the visibility extended to lesbians within popular culture ofte…
Health social movements and the hybridisation of ‘cause regimes: An ethnography of a British childbirth organisation
This article reports on an ethnographic study of the UK’s largest health advocacy organisation dedicated to pregnancy, childbirth and parenting, the National Childbirth Trust or NCT. Working from interview data, textual materials and fieldnotes, we articulate three key phases in the NCT’s historically shifting relationships to feminism, medicine, the state and neoliberal capitalism. The concept of folded cause regimes is introduced as we examine …
Dis/ability studies: Theorising disablism and ableism
Benefits broods’: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense
In the aftermath of the global banking crises, a political economy of permanent state austerity has emerged, driven by and legitimated through a hardening anti-welfare commonsense. We argue that, while there is an excellent evidence base emerging around solidifying negative public attitudes towards welfare, critical policy studies needs to attend to the cultural as well as the political economies through which an anti-welfare commonsense is forme…
Classificatory Struggles: Class, Culture and Inequality in Neoliberal Times
The problem that the concept of 'class' describes is inequality. The transition from industrial to financial capitalism (neoliberalism) in Europe has effected 'deepening inequalities of income, health and life chances within and between countries, on a scale not seen since before the second world War' (Hall et al., 2014: 9). In this context, class is an essential point of orientation for sociology if it is to grasp the problem of inequality today…
The Tactics of Asylum and Irregular Migrant Support Groups: Disrupting Bodily, Technological, and Neoliberal Strategies of Control
States are exercising an increasing array of spatial strategies of migration control, including in the area of asylum migration. Drawing on interview data with thirty-five British and American irregular migrant and asylum support groups (MASGs), this article explores the spatial “tactics” (De Certeau 1984) employed by MASGs in response to strategies of migration control. We consider their infiltration of highly securitized physical spaces like de…
Thinking with 'White Dee: The Gender Politics of 'Austerity Porn
Focusing on Benefits Street, and specifically the figure of White Dee, this rapid response article offers a feminist analysis of the relationship between media portrayals of people living with poverty and the gender politics of austerity. To do this we locate and unpick the paradoxical desires coalescing in the making and remaking of the figure of 'White Dee' in the public sphere. We detail how Benefits Street operates through forms of classed an…
The business of child detention: Charitable Co-Option, Migrant Advocacy and Activist Outrage
In 2010 the British government announced that the outrage of child detention for immigration purposes was to end. Simultaneously, however, it commissioned the opening of a new family detention centre called CEDARS. An acronym for Compassion, Empathy, Dignity, Approachability, Respect and Support, CEDARS is run under novel governance arrangements by the Home Office, private security company G4S and the children's charity Barnardo's. This article d…
Postcolonial Girl: Mediated Intimacy and Migrant Audibility
In October 2010, Gamu Nhengu, a Zimbabwean teenager, was ejected from the popular British reality TV talent show, The X Factor, on which she was a contestant. There was a public backlash to what many perceived as an unjust eviction. Within days, however, Gamu became the emblem of a contrasting kind of eviction campaign, when it was revealed that she and her family were living illegally in Britain. ‘Gamu-gate’, as the case was named in the press, …
Naked protest: The Maternal Politics of Citizenship and Revolt
Immigrant protests have the capacity to call regimes of citizenship into question in important ways. This paper explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers agains…
Immigrant protest: An Introduction
The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of ci…
The Riots of the Underclass: Stigmatisation, Mediation and the Government of Poverty and Disadvantage in Neoliberal Britain
The riots in England in August 2011 comprised one of the most significant events of civil unrest in recent British history. A consensus rapidly emerged, notably within political commentary, print journalism, television and online news media coverage of these five nights of rioting, that these were the riots of the underclass. This article explores how and why the conceptual and perceptual frame of the underclass - a frame through which child pove…
Pramface Girls: The Class Politics of ‘Maternal TV’
Pramface. Noun:A teenage mother, usually from a council housing estate. Coined by the online gossip site, popbitch, and originally a woman with the facial looks of a poor single mother. Derog.The seven-second pre-credit sequence of Episode 3, Series 2 of the British reality television show Underage
Chav Mum Chav Scum: Class disgust in contemporary Britain
In the last three years a new vocabulary of social class has emerged in Britain. The word "chav," alongside its various synonyms and regional variations, has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor. This article explores the emergence of the grotesque and comic figure of the chav within a range of contemporary British media focusing on the role played by disgust reactions in the generation and circulation of the chav figure through p…
Rethinking the sociology of stigma
Stigma is not a self-evident phenomenon but like all concepts has a history. The conceptual understanding of stigma which underpins most sociological research has its roots in the ground-breaking account penned by Erving Goffman in his best-selling book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). In the 50 years since its publication, Goffman's account of stigma has proved a productive concept, in terms of furthering research on s…
Classificatory Struggles: Class, Culture and Inequality in Neoliberal Times
The problem that the concept of 'class' describes is inequality. The transition from industrial to financial capitalism (neoliberalism) in Europe has effected 'deepening inequalities of income, health and life chances within and between countries, on a scale not seen since before the second world War' (Hall et al., 2014: 9). In this context, class is an essential point of orientation for sociology if it is to grasp the problem of inequality today…
Resituating Erving Goffman: From Stigma Power to Black Power
This article offers a critical re-reading of the understanding of stigma forged by the North American sociologist Erving Goffman in his influential Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). One of the most widely read and cited sociologists in history, Goffman was already famous when Stigma was published in 1963. His previous books were best-sellers and Stigma alone has sold an astonishing 800,000 copies in the 50 years since it…
Benefits broods’: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense
In the aftermath of the global banking crises, a political economy of permanent state austerity has emerged, driven by and legitimated through a hardening anti-welfare commonsense. We argue that, while there is an excellent evidence base emerging around solidifying negative public attitudes towards welfare, critical policy studies needs to attend to the cultural as well as the political economies through which an anti-welfare commonsense is forme…
Celebrity chav’: Fame, femininity and social class
This article argues that celebrity is an increasingly significant means by which reactionary class attitudes, allegiances and judgements are communicated. In contradistinction to claims that the concept of social class has lost its analytic value in the context of contemporary consumer society and the growing ideological purchase of meritocracy and choice, the article contends that class remains central to the constitution and meaning of celebrit…
Immigrant protest: An Introduction
The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of ci…
Designed to fail: A biopolitics of British citizenship
Tracing a route through the recent 'ugly history' of British citizenship, this article advances two central claims. Firstly, British citizenship has been designed to fail specific groups and populations. Failure, it argues, is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate. Secondly, British citizenship is a biopolitics - a field of techniques and pract…
Welcome to Britain’: The Cultural Politics of Asylum
Questions of asylum and immigration have taken centre stage in national and international debate and figure prominently in the domestic political agendas of wealthy states and nations. In Australia, Europe and the US, harsh and punitive asylum and immigration laws are being enacted incrementally and asylum-seekers are subject increasingly to detention. Through a focus on the detention of asylum-seekers in the UK, this article makes a critical int…
The Riots of the Underclass: Stigmatisation, Mediation and the Government of Poverty and Disadvantage in Neoliberal Britain
The riots in England in August 2011 comprised one of the most significant events of civil unrest in recent British history. A consensus rapidly emerged, notably within political commentary, print journalism, television and online news media coverage of these five nights of rioting, that these were the riots of the underclass. This article explores how and why the conceptual and perceptual frame of the underclass - a frame through which child pove…
Against abjection
This article is about the theoretical life of `the abject'. It focuses on the ways in which Anglo-American and Australian feminist theoretical accounts of maternal bodies and identities have utilized Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. Whilst the abject has proved a compelling and productive concept for feminist theory, this article cautions against the repetition of the maternal (as) abject within theoretical writing. It argues that employing …
Thinking with 'White Dee: The Gender Politics of 'Austerity Porn
Focusing on Benefits Street, and specifically the figure of White Dee, this rapid response article offers a feminist analysis of the relationship between media portrayals of people living with poverty and the gender politics of austerity. To do this we locate and unpick the paradoxical desires coalescing in the making and remaking of the figure of 'White Dee' in the public sphere. We detail how Benefits Street operates through forms of classed an…
The Tactics of Asylum and Irregular Migrant Support Groups: Disrupting Bodily, Technological, and Neoliberal Strategies of Control
States are exercising an increasing array of spatial strategies of migration control, including in the area of asylum migration. Drawing on interview data with thirty-five British and American irregular migrant and asylum support groups (MASGs), this article explores the spatial “tactics” (De Certeau 1984) employed by MASGs in response to strategies of migration control. We consider their infiltration of highly securitized physical spaces like de…
Naked protest: The Maternal Politics of Citizenship and Revolt
Immigrant protests have the capacity to call regimes of citizenship into question in important ways. This paper explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers agains…
Lesbian brides: Post-queer popular culture
The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of lesbian representations in European and North American popular culture, particularly within television drama and broader celebrity culture. The abundance of “positive” and “ordinary” representations of lesbians is widely celebrated as signifying progress in queer struggles for social equality. Yet, as this article details, the terms of the visibility extended to lesbians within popular culture ofte…
The hieroglyphics of the border: Racial stigma in neoliberal Europe
In the summer of 2015, 1.5 million refugees arrived at Europe's borders. This article examines how and why this humanitarian crisis was transformed into a "racist crisis". It begins by recounting a highly publicized event in the Czech Republic which saw police forcibly removing hundreds of people from trains at midnight in the border town of Břeclav, before inking numbers on their arms and transporting them to detention centres. Thinking with thi…
Chav Scum: The Filthy Politics of Social Class in Contemporary Britain
In the last three years a new filthy vocabulary of social class has emerged in Britain. The word "chav", and its various synonyms and regional variations, has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for white working class subjects. An entire slang vocabulary has emerged around chav. Acronyms, such as "Council Housed and Vile" have sprung up to explain the term. Folk etymologies and some scholarly sources suggest that the term chav might derive from a …
The business of child detention: Charitable Co-Option, Migrant Advocacy and Activist Outrage
In 2010 the British government announced that the outrage of child detention for immigration purposes was to end. Simultaneously, however, it commissioned the opening of a new family detention centre called CEDARS. An acronym for Compassion, Empathy, Dignity, Approachability, Respect and Support, CEDARS is run under novel governance arrangements by the Home Office, private security company G4S and the children's charity Barnardo's. This article d…
Dis/ability studies: Theorising disablism and ableism
Introduction: Birth
We are all born. Hannah Arendt suggests that the absence of this primary fact from histories of thought represents a significant lacuna in political and philosophical traditions. For Arendt natality, the capacity to begin, is the foundational fact of all thought, all politics and all action. Without some fundmental understanding of the place of birth, there can, she suggests, be no social change, no human future. Arendt’s insistence on thinking b…
From `The Me Decade' to `The Me Millennium: The cultural history of narcissism
Claims that consumer-orientated and media-saturated cultures have given rise to `a new narcissism' have been repeatedly asserted within social and cultural criticism for the past 40 years. Within cultural studies there has been a recent proliferation of accounts of the rise of narcissism in analyses of consumer culture, celebrity culture and new media. Returning to key influential accounts of `cultural narcissism' that emerged in social criticism…
Commentary And Criticism
Between March and December 2008 Jane Arthurs was co-editor, with Usha Zacharias, of the Commentary and Criticism Section of this journal, which included topical short essays themed around issues of significance to feminist media studies either from a methodological, critical or political point of view. This article covered the politics of the ‘affective turn’ in critical theory
Who put the "Me" in feminism: The sexual politics of narcissism
This article examines what is at stake in the attribution of narcissism to femininity and feminism and the routes through which arguments about 'feminist narcissism' became central to the popular abjection of feminism. It emphasizes the central role of narcissistic theories of identity in enabling feminist theory to prise open the mechanisms of feminine identity and thereby expose and critique the sexual politics of identity practices. The articl…
Health social movements and the hybridisation of ‘cause regimes: An ethnography of a British childbirth organisation
This article reports on an ethnographic study of the UK’s largest health advocacy organisation dedicated to pregnancy, childbirth and parenting, the National Childbirth Trust or NCT. Working from interview data, textual materials and fieldnotes, we articulate three key phases in the NCT’s historically shifting relationships to feminism, medicine, the state and neoliberal capitalism. The concept of folded cause regimes is introduced as we examine …
Lancaster Back History Group: Anti-racist education after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests
Who put the "Me" in feminism: The sexual politics of narcissism
This article examines what is at stake in the attribution of narcissism to femininity and feminism and the routes through which arguments about 'feminist narcissism' became central to the popular abjection of feminism. It emphasizes the central role of narcissistic theories of identity in enabling feminist theory to prise open the mechanisms of feminine identity and thereby expose and critique the sexual politics of identity practices. The articl…
Welcome to Britain’: The Cultural Politics of Asylum
Questions of asylum and immigration have taken centre stage in national and international debate and figure prominently in the domestic political agendas of wealthy states and nations. In Australia, Europe and the US, harsh and punitive asylum and immigration laws are being enacted incrementally and asylum-seekers are subject increasingly to detention. Through a focus on the detention of asylum-seekers in the UK, this article makes a critical int…
Colonized Feeling
Chav Scum: The Filthy Politics of Social Class in Contemporary Britain
In the last three years a new filthy vocabulary of social class has emerged in Britain. The word "chav", and its various synonyms and regional variations, has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for white working class subjects. An entire slang vocabulary has emerged around chav. Acronyms, such as "Council Housed and Vile" have sprung up to explain the term. Folk etymologies and some scholarly sources suggest that the term chav might derive from a …
From `The Me Decade' to `The Me Millennium: The cultural history of narcissism
Claims that consumer-orientated and media-saturated cultures have given rise to `a new narcissism' have been repeatedly asserted within social and cultural criticism for the past 40 years. Within cultural studies there has been a recent proliferation of accounts of the rise of narcissism in analyses of consumer culture, celebrity culture and new media. Returning to key influential accounts of `cultural narcissism' that emerged in social criticism…
Commentary And Criticism
Between March and December 2008 Jane Arthurs was co-editor, with Usha Zacharias, of the Commentary and Criticism Section of this journal, which included topical short essays themed around issues of significance to feminist media studies either from a methodological, critical or political point of view. This article covered the politics of the ‘affective turn’ in critical theory
Chav Mum Chav Scum: Class disgust in contemporary Britain
In the last three years a new vocabulary of social class has emerged in Britain. The word "chav," alongside its various synonyms and regional variations, has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor. This article explores the emergence of the grotesque and comic figure of the chav within a range of contemporary British media focusing on the role played by disgust reactions in the generation and circulation of the chav figure through p…
Against abjection
This article is about the theoretical life of `the abject'. It focuses on the ways in which Anglo-American and Australian feminist theoretical accounts of maternal bodies and identities have utilized Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. Whilst the abject has proved a compelling and productive concept for feminist theory, this article cautions against the repetition of the maternal (as) abject within theoretical writing. It argues that employing …
The Taboo Aesthetics of the Birth Scene
Introduction: Birth
We are all born. Hannah Arendt suggests that the absence of this primary fact from histories of thought represents a significant lacuna in political and philosophical traditions. For Arendt natality, the capacity to begin, is the foundational fact of all thought, all politics and all action. Without some fundmental understanding of the place of birth, there can, she suggests, be no social change, no human future. Arendt’s insistence on thinking b…
Maternal encounters: The ethics of interruption
Celebrity chav’: Fame, femininity and social class
This article argues that celebrity is an increasingly significant means by which reactionary class attitudes, allegiances and judgements are communicated. In contradistinction to claims that the concept of social class has lost its analytic value in the context of contemporary consumer society and the growing ideological purchase of meritocracy and choice, the article contends that class remains central to the constitution and meaning of celebrit…
Designed to fail: A biopolitics of British citizenship
Tracing a route through the recent 'ugly history' of British citizenship, this article advances two central claims. Firstly, British citizenship has been designed to fail specific groups and populations. Failure, it argues, is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate. Secondly, British citizenship is a biopolitics - a field of techniques and pract…
Pramface Girls: The Class Politics of ‘Maternal TV’
Pramface. Noun:A teenage mother, usually from a council housing estate. Coined by the online gossip site, popbitch, and originally a woman with the facial looks of a poor single mother. Derog.The seven-second pre-credit sequence of Episode 3, Series 2 of the British reality television show Underage
Pregnant Beauty: Maternal Femininities under Neoliberalism
Since the mid-1990s there has been an extraordinary proliferation of representations of maternity within popular culture, arts, literature, politics, consumer culture and ‘everyday life’. The fascination with celebrity pregnancy and motherhood, the emergence of ‘momoir’ literary genres, a new emphasis on the maternal in the visual and performance arts and the ascendance of ‘Maternal TV’ reality formats, are indicative of this new visibility. The …
Postcolonial Girl: Mediated Intimacy and Migrant Audibility
In October 2010, Gamu Nhengu, a Zimbabwean teenager, was ejected from the popular British reality TV talent show, The X Factor, on which she was a contestant. There was a public backlash to what many perceived as an unjust eviction. Within days, however, Gamu became the emblem of a contrasting kind of eviction campaign, when it was revealed that she and her family were living illegally in Britain. ‘Gamu-gate’, as the case was named in the press, …
Naked protest: The Maternal Politics of Citizenship and Revolt
Immigrant protests have the capacity to call regimes of citizenship into question in important ways. This paper explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers agains…
Immigrant protest: An Introduction
The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of ci…
The Riots of the Underclass: Stigmatisation, Mediation and the Government of Poverty and Disadvantage in Neoliberal Britain
The riots in England in August 2011 comprised one of the most significant events of civil unrest in recent British history. A consensus rapidly emerged, notably within political commentary, print journalism, television and online news media coverage of these five nights of rioting, that these were the riots of the underclass. This article explores how and why the conceptual and perceptual frame of the underclass - a frame through which child pove…
The Tactics of Asylum and Irregular Migrant Support Groups: Disrupting Bodily, Technological, and Neoliberal Strategies of Control
States are exercising an increasing array of spatial strategies of migration control, including in the area of asylum migration. Drawing on interview data with thirty-five British and American irregular migrant and asylum support groups (MASGs), this article explores the spatial “tactics” (De Certeau 1984) employed by MASGs in response to strategies of migration control. We consider their infiltration of highly securitized physical spaces like de…
Thinking with 'White Dee: The Gender Politics of 'Austerity Porn
Focusing on Benefits Street, and specifically the figure of White Dee, this rapid response article offers a feminist analysis of the relationship between media portrayals of people living with poverty and the gender politics of austerity. To do this we locate and unpick the paradoxical desires coalescing in the making and remaking of the figure of 'White Dee' in the public sphere. We detail how Benefits Street operates through forms of classed an…
The business of child detention: Charitable Co-Option, Migrant Advocacy and Activist Outrage
In 2010 the British government announced that the outrage of child detention for immigration purposes was to end. Simultaneously, however, it commissioned the opening of a new family detention centre called CEDARS. An acronym for Compassion, Empathy, Dignity, Approachability, Respect and Support, CEDARS is run under novel governance arrangements by the Home Office, private security company G4S and the children's charity Barnardo's. This article d…
Dis/ability studies: Theorising disablism and ableism
Benefits broods’: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense
In the aftermath of the global banking crises, a political economy of permanent state austerity has emerged, driven by and legitimated through a hardening anti-welfare commonsense. We argue that, while there is an excellent evidence base emerging around solidifying negative public attitudes towards welfare, critical policy studies needs to attend to the cultural as well as the political economies through which an anti-welfare commonsense is forme…
Classificatory Struggles: Class, Culture and Inequality in Neoliberal Times
The problem that the concept of 'class' describes is inequality. The transition from industrial to financial capitalism (neoliberalism) in Europe has effected 'deepening inequalities of income, health and life chances within and between countries, on a scale not seen since before the second world War' (Hall et al., 2014: 9). In this context, class is an essential point of orientation for sociology if it is to grasp the problem of inequality today…
Sociology (34 works) · Political science (29 works) · Law (27 works) · Gender Studies (25 works) · Politics (24 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Criminology (10 works) · Law (10 works)