H Pilkington
Biographic Data
| ID | 47547 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Pilkington |
| GIVEN NAMES | H |
| FAMILY NAME | Pilkington |
| SIGNATURE | PILKINGTON H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4041-430X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Impacts of anti-migrant policy and activism: The dynamics of hostility around small boat crossings to Dover
Working at the interstices of critical social policy, sociology and social movement studies, this article contributes to understanding the social impact of anti-migrant mobilisation. Research on anti-migrant activism has focused to date on the sociography, action repertoire, discursive strategies and propensity for political violence of anti-migrant actors. This article considers its impact on those working in public and third sector roles suppor…
Introduction to the special issue: Reflections on young people’s responses to negative everyday representations of themselves
At a time when existential crises – environmental disaster, pandemic, war – jostle for pole place in our hierarchy of concerns, it is not surprising that not only what is happening, but our responses to it, come under intense scrutiny. Young people, whose responses to the social world, historically, have been subject to surveillance and representation as ‘trouble’, are again centre-stage in society’s imagination. They appear, at once, as the symb…
Radicalization as and in Process: Tracing Journeys through an “Extreme-Right” Milieu
The vast majority of those engaging with radical ideas do not pursue radicalization trajectories to an endpoint of violent extremism. However, empirical research charting journeys of "non-radicalization" remains scarce. This article draws on ethnographic research tracing pathways through an "extreme right" milieu. It identifies a range of journeys – of partial, stalled and non-radicalization – and the complex interweaving of political and persona…
Why Should We Care What Extremists Think? The Contribution of Emic Perspectives to Understanding the “right-wing extremist” Mind-Set
This article considers the implications of the mainstreaming of ‘right-wing extremism’ for what, and whom, we understand as ‘extreme’. It draws on ethnographic research (2017-2020) with young people active in movements routinely referred to in public and academic discourse as ‘extreme right’ or ‘far right’. Based on interviews, informal communication and observation, the article explores how actors in the milieu understand ‘extremism’ and how far…
Not apologising for a community: Young people’s responses to misrecognition and stigma
This article considers the experiences of four groups of young people (from Germany, Estonia, Russia and the UK) whose ‘mode of being’ is reduced or distorted in different ways as a result of misrecognition or stigmatisation. It argues that the responses young people make to this form of social subordination are enabled or constrained by the recognition status – misrecognition, absence of recognition or stigmatisation – they experience. It demons…
Not Entitled to Talk: (Mis)recognition, Inequality and Social Activism of Young Muslims
This article considers the relationship between (mis)recognition, inequality and social activism through the lens of young Muslims' response to their positioning as 'suspect communities'. It draws on qualitative empirical research to suggest that the institutionalisation of misrecognition, including through the preventative ('Prevent') arm of UK counter-terrorism strategy, may mobilise young Muslims to resist 'suspect' status and make claims to t…
Employing meta-ethnography in the analysis of qualitative data sets on youth activism: A New Tool for Transnational Research Projects
This article outlines a novel application of meta-ethnographic synthesis in the analysis of multiple ethnographic case studies of youth activism emanating from a large transnational European research project. Although meta-ethnography is used increasingly as an alternative to systematic review for the synthesis of published qualitative studies, it is not widely applied to the synthesis of primary data. This article suggests such a use is not prec…
‘EDL angels stand beside their men … not behind them’: The politics of gender and sexuality in an anti-Islam(ist) movement
This article revisits the view that women are absent or insignificant across the extreme right spectrum. It draws on ethnographic research with grassroots activists in the English Defence League to explore whether a new generation of populist radical right movements offers a gender politics and practice capable of appealing to women and LGBT constituencies. It critically interrogates claims that the movement has made real shifts in the openness t…
In search of the missing link: Gender, education and the radical right
There is to date no systematic examination of how scholarship on gender and education intersects with studies of the radical right. While there is considerable practical and scholarly work attendin
Series editor's foreword
This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employmen…
‘Their way or no way’: Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments
This chapter critically evaluates characterisations of the EDL as ‘Islamophobic’. It outlines debates about how we might define and measure ‘Islamophobia’, focusing on the question of whether Islamophobia is a new, and distinct, phenomenon or consists primarily in anti-Muslim attitudes, which are adequately understood within the existing notion of cultural racism. It provides a detailed exploration of the nature and content of perceptions of, and…
The contagion of stigma: The ethics and politics of research with the ‘far right’
This chapter discusses the politics and ethics of conducting ethnographic research with ‘distasteful’ groups. It details how this three-year ethnographic study among activists in the EDL was conducted including questions of access, trust and consent. It considers how research respondents understood the researcher’s position and the researcher’s own understanding of her positionality and the political issues raised by research with movements perce…
‘Second-class citizens’: Reordering privilege and prejudice
This chapter considers how EDL activists construct notions of ‘self’ as devalued and discriminated white working class through the narrative of ‘second-class citizens’. Expressions of resentment and injustice, and its links to class and racialised identities, are traced through the literature on the backlash to multiculturalism in the UK. This is followed by a detailed exploration of accounts by respondents of their experience of injustice and th…
‘Loud and proud’: Piercing the politics of silencing
In this chapter the relationship between EDL activism and the external political environment is considered. It illustrates how EDL activists experience the external political realm as a politics of silencing in which the expression of their views, as well as government policy, are constrained by the application of the ‘racism label’. This compounds a wider disengagement from the formal political sphere and a denial of the ‘political’ nature of ac…
‘Not racist, not violent, just no longer silent’: Aspirations to non-racism
In this chapter claims to non-racism by EDL activists are critically explored. A theoretical discussion of core debates over the contemporary meanings of ‘race’, racism and post-racialism is followed by a detailed exploration of EDL activists’ understandings of what constitutes racism and what it means to be racist. These narratives suggest a genuine aspiration to non-racism among most grassroots members of the movement. At the organisational lev…
Doing the hokey-cokey: Everyday trajectories of activism
This chapter provides a broad brush socio-demographic portrait of activists in this study set in the context of existing data on the composition of support for, and activism in, the far right. A more detailed introduction to the life stories of eight key respondents is provided in the form of short vignettes designed to help readers understand how activism sits within real lives. The chapter then considers the routes in (and often out again) of t…
Tommy Robinson's barmy army?: The past, present and future of the English Defence League
This chapter provides an overview of the origins, trajectory and structure of the EDL as an organisation. It considers key moments in its founding and development and considers what the future holds as the movement tries to stabilise and rebuild following the resignation of its co-founders and leaders in 2013. It outlines the formal structure of the organisation and uses ethnographic data to understand how the movement is experienced organisation…
Conclusion: Passion and politics
This chapter argues the case for conducting ethnographic studies of ‘distasteful’ groups notwithstanding the political and ethical issues that such research raises. Traditional studies of the far right tend to forefront the analysis of ideological frames and organisational effectiveness and take little account of the people who maintain such movements; individuals appear largely in the form of agglomerated socio-demographics of ‘supporters’ or ‘v…
Foreword by Anoop Nayal
This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employmen…
‘One big family’: Emotion, affect and the meaning of activism
This chapter discusses the emotional and affective dimensions of EDL activism by exploring the pleasures of the ‘demo buzz’ and the ontological security generated by relationships formed in the EDL ‘family’. It outlines theoretical debates on emotion and affect in social movements and adopts the notion of ‘affective practice’ to understand and explore the role of emotion in EDL activism. It shows how street demonstrations are experienced by respo…
Loud and proud: Passion and politics in the English Defence League
Loud and proud': Politics and passion in the English Defence League is a study of grassroots activism in what is widely considered to be a violent Islamophobic and racist organisation.The book uses interviews, informal conversations and extended observation at EDL events to critically reflect on the gap between the movement's public image and activists' own understandings of it. It details how activists construct the EDL, and themselves, as 'not …
‘How Can I Say it … in a More Tolerant Way?’ Ambiguity, Ambivalence and Contradiction in Youth Dialogue on Ethnic Tolerance and Intolerance
Although survey data identify no significant predictor of intolerance among the Russian population, young people are considered to display heightened levels of ethnic intolerance and radical variants of xenophobia. Drawing on survey and semi-structured interview data from a study of patriotism among young people in two cities in the North-West region of Russia, this article explores the strength of ethnic self-identification and ethnically exclus…
Politics are Bollocks’: Youth, Politics and Activism in Contemporary Europe
This introductory article introduces the MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement) project, the findings of which are the basis of the articles in this volume. MYPLACE maps the relationship between political heritage, current levels and forms of civic and political engagement of young people in Europe, and their potential receptivity to radical and populist political agendas. In this introductory article, the implications of …
Loud and Proud: Youth and the Politics of Silencing
This article considers negative or critical views towards democracy and politics among young people, including supporters of ultra-patriotic or populist radical right movements, in the UK, eastern Germany and Russia. These countries represent a range of political heritages and current constitutions of democracy but, in all three contexts, it is suggested, young people experience some degree of the closing down of 'legitimate' political discourse …
Sounds of a ‘Rotting City’: Punk in Russia’s Arctic Hinterland
Russia is far from the natural habitat of punk. Since its emergence in Soviet Russia of the late 1970s (Steinholt, 2005, pp. 69–70), punk has defied de facto any structuralist explanation of the movement as the manifestation of resistance to capitalism’s attempt to repress and contain desires into forms useful to capitalists (Thompson, 2004). At the same time, readings of British punk as the culmination of twentieth-century radical aesthetic move…
Politics are Bollocks’: Youth, Politics and Activism in Contemporary Europe
This introductory article introduces the MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement) project, the findings of which are the basis of the articles in this volume. MYPLACE maps the relationship between political heritage, current levels and forms of civic and political engagement of young people in Europe, and their potential receptivity to radical and populist political agendas. In this introductory article, the implications of …
Loud and proud: Passion and politics in the English Defence League
Loud and proud': Politics and passion in the English Defence League is a study of grassroots activism in what is widely considered to be a violent Islamophobic and racist organisation.The book uses interviews, informal conversations and extended observation at EDL events to critically reflect on the gap between the movement's public image and activists' own understandings of it. It details how activists construct the EDL, and themselves, as 'not …
Peripheral Youth: Relations of Identity and Power in Global/Local Context
In this introduction, the editors construct a dialogue between a wideranging review of theories and research on global/local relations in youth cultures and the articles published in this Special Issue on aspects of youthful `peripherality'. This field of study, which has become cross-disciplinary, increasingly does justice to local diversities, but has often been led by arguments in social theory that have been `core-centric'. The editors argue …
Not Entitled to Talk: (Mis)recognition, Inequality and Social Activism of Young Muslims
This article considers the relationship between (mis)recognition, inequality and social activism through the lens of young Muslims' response to their positioning as 'suspect communities'. It draws on qualitative empirical research to suggest that the institutionalisation of misrecognition, including through the preventative ('Prevent') arm of UK counter-terrorism strategy, may mobilise young Muslims to resist 'suspect' status and make claims to t…
In Good Company: Risk, Security and Choice in Young People'S Drug Decisions
This article draws on original empirical research with young people to question the degree to which 'individualisation of risk', as developed in the work of Beck and Giddens, adequately explains the risks young people bear and take. It draws on alternative understandings and critiques of 'risk' not to refute the notion of the reflexive individual upon which 'individualisation of risk' is based but to re-read that reflexivity in a more hermeneutic…
Employing meta-ethnography in the analysis of qualitative data sets on youth activism: A New Tool for Transnational Research Projects
This article outlines a novel application of meta-ethnographic synthesis in the analysis of multiple ethnographic case studies of youth activism emanating from a large transnational European research project. Although meta-ethnography is used increasingly as an alternative to systematic review for the synthesis of published qualitative studies, it is not widely applied to the synthesis of primary data. This article suggests such a use is not prec…
In search of the missing link: Gender, education and the radical right
There is to date no systematic examination of how scholarship on gender and education intersects with studies of the radical right. While there is considerable practical and scholarly work attendin
Vorkuta is the Capital of the World: People, Place and the Everyday Production of the Local
This article considers the relationship between people and place in the everyday production of the local. Based on empirical research with young people in Russia's far north it offers an empirically substantiated argument that processes of deterritorialization do not necessarily imply the disembedding of people from either the national or the local. Drawing on discursive psychological approaches to the construction of nationhood, the article demo…
No Longer “On Parade”: Style and the Performance of Skinhead in the Russian Far North
Loud and Proud: Youth and the Politics of Silencing
This article considers negative or critical views towards democracy and politics among young people, including supporters of ultra-patriotic or populist radical right movements, in the UK, eastern Germany and Russia. These countries represent a range of political heritages and current constitutions of democracy but, in all three contexts, it is suggested, young people experience some degree of the closing down of 'legitimate' political discourse …
Regrounding Youth Cultural Theory (in Post‐Socialist Youth Cultural Practice)
This article considers how the study of youth cultural practice in Eastern Europe informs theoretical and empirical debate about youth culture. It charts the trajectory of academic writing on East European youth cultures and suggests the region’s state socialist past (which made social inequalities relatively insignificant at a time when, elsewhere, youth cultural studies were dominated by class‐based readings) combined with the explosion of ineq…
For us it is normal’: Exploring the ‘Recreational’ Use of heroin in Russian youth cultural practice
The rise in the availability of drugs and experimentation with them by Russian youth over the course of the 1990s suggests that drug use has become ‘normalized’ within Russian youth cultural practice. While this is indicative of the global nature of drugs markets, there remain significant differences in local patterns and practices of drug use. In Russia, one such difference stems from the high visibility of heroin on mainstream youth cultural sc…
A Diaspora in Diaspora? Russian Returnees Confront the “Homeland”
The term “Russian diaspora” is used to refer to the twenty-five million ethnic Russians who in 1991 found themselves politically displaced beyond the borders of the Russian Federation and resident within newly independent states. This paper firstly reviews the problematic “classification” of these communities as a “diaspora.” More specifically, by drawing on narratives of “home” and “homeland” among those Russians “forced” to return to the Russia…
Introduction to the special issue: Reflections on young people’s responses to negative everyday representations of themselves
At a time when existential crises – environmental disaster, pandemic, war – jostle for pole place in our hierarchy of concerns, it is not surprising that not only what is happening, but our responses to it, come under intense scrutiny. Young people, whose responses to the social world, historically, have been subject to surveillance and representation as ‘trouble’, are again centre-stage in society’s imagination. They appear, at once, as the symb…
Radicalization as and in Process: Tracing Journeys through an “Extreme-Right” Milieu
The vast majority of those engaging with radical ideas do not pursue radicalization trajectories to an endpoint of violent extremism. However, empirical research charting journeys of "non-radicalization" remains scarce. This article draws on ethnographic research tracing pathways through an "extreme right" milieu. It identifies a range of journeys – of partial, stalled and non-radicalization – and the complex interweaving of political and persona…
Book notes
Political Participation and Democracy in Britain by Geraint Parry, George Moyser and Neil Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp.xviii + 510; index, bibliography, three appendices. £60 (hardback); £17.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 521 33298 2 and 33602 3 Work and Citizenship in the New Europe edited by Harry Coenen and Peter Leisink. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993. Pp.254; index, bibliography. £38.50. ISBN 1 85278 739 2 Capitalist Developme…
Book notes
Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference by Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp.x + 237; £30. ISBN 0 521 33040 8 Representation and Party Politics: A Comparative Perspective by B.D. Graham. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell 1993. Pp.242 + table; £40 (hardback); £13.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 63117 395 1 and 0 63117 396 X The Market, Competition and Democracy: A Critique of…
Book notes
Nationalisms: The Nation‐State and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century by Montserrat Guibernau. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Pp.174. £39.50 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 7456 1401 9 and 1402 7 Decentralization and Rural Development in Mexico: Community Participation in Oaxaca's Municipal Funds Program by Jonathan Fox and Josefina Aranda. San Diego, CA: Center for U.S.‐Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, Monograph Ser…
Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia
Peripheral Youth: Relations of Identity and Power in Global/Local Context
In this introduction, the editors construct a dialogue between a wideranging review of theories and research on global/local relations in youth cultures and the articles published in this Special Issue on aspects of youthful `peripherality'. This field of study, which has become cross-disciplinary, increasingly does justice to local diversities, but has often been led by arguments in social theory that have been `core-centric'. The editors argue …
Looking West? Cultural Globalization and Russian Youth Cultures
Looking West? Cultural Globalization and Russian Youth Cultures
For us it is normal’: Exploring the ‘Recreational’ Use of heroin in Russian youth cultural practice
The rise in the availability of drugs and experimentation with them by Russian youth over the course of the 1990s suggests that drug use has become ‘normalized’ within Russian youth cultural practice. While this is indicative of the global nature of drugs markets, there remain significant differences in local patterns and practices of drug use. In Russia, one such difference stems from the high visibility of heroin on mainstream youth cultural sc…
A Diaspora in Diaspora? Russian Returnees Confront the “Homeland”
The term “Russian diaspora” is used to refer to the twenty-five million ethnic Russians who in 1991 found themselves politically displaced beyond the borders of the Russian Federation and resident within newly independent states. This paper firstly reviews the problematic “classification” of these communities as a “diaspora.” More specifically, by drawing on narratives of “home” and “homeland” among those Russians “forced” to return to the Russia…
Beyond ‘peer pressure’: Rethinking drug use and ‘youth culture’
In Good Company: Risk, Security and Choice in Young People'S Drug Decisions
This article draws on original empirical research with young people to question the degree to which 'individualisation of risk', as developed in the work of Beck and Giddens, adequately explains the risks young people bear and take. It draws on alternative understandings and critiques of 'risk' not to refute the notion of the reflexive individual upon which 'individualisation of risk' is based but to re-read that reflexivity in a more hermeneutic…
The mutual extraction industry: Drug use and the normative structure of social capital in the Russian far north
Russia's Skinheads
Russia’s Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives provides a thorough examination of the phenomenon of skinheads, explaining its nature and its significance, and assessing how far Russian skinhead subculture is the ‘lumpen’ end of the extreme nationalist ideological spectrum. There are large numbers of skinheads in Russia, responsible for a significant number of xenophobic attacks, including 97 deaths in 2008 alone, making this book …
No Longer “On Parade”: Style and the Performance of Skinhead in the Russian Far North
Vorkuta is the Capital of the World: People, Place and the Everyday Production of the Local
This article considers the relationship between people and place in the everyday production of the local. Based on empirical research with young people in Russia's far north it offers an empirically substantiated argument that processes of deterritorialization do not necessarily imply the disembedding of people from either the national or the local. Drawing on discursive psychological approaches to the construction of nationhood, the article demo…
Russia's Youth and its Culture: A Nation's Constructors and Constructed
Since the political whirlwinds of the mid-1980s and the fall of communism in 1991, Russia has undergone dramatic social change, much of which has escaped the attention of Western media.In her new book, Hilary Pilkington applies the methods of cultural studies research to the study of Russian youth. She does this by `deconstructing' the social discourses within which Russian youth has been constructed and by providing an alternative reading of you…
Regrounding Youth Cultural Theory (in Post‐Socialist Youth Cultural Practice)
This article considers how the study of youth cultural practice in Eastern Europe informs theoretical and empirical debate about youth culture. It charts the trajectory of academic writing on East European youth cultures and suggests the region’s state socialist past (which made social inequalities relatively insignificant at a time when, elsewhere, youth cultural studies were dominated by class‐based readings) combined with the explosion of ineq…
Sounds of a ‘Rotting City’: Punk in Russia’s Arctic Hinterland
Russia is far from the natural habitat of punk. Since its emergence in Soviet Russia of the late 1970s (Steinholt, 2005, pp. 69–70), punk has defied de facto any structuralist explanation of the movement as the manifestation of resistance to capitalism’s attempt to repress and contain desires into forms useful to capitalists (Thompson, 2004). At the same time, readings of British punk as the culmination of twentieth-century radical aesthetic move…
Sounds of a â Rotting Cityâ
Punk in Russia: Cultural Mutation from the Useless to the Moronic
‘How Can I Say it … in a More Tolerant Way?’ Ambiguity, Ambivalence and Contradiction in Youth Dialogue on Ethnic Tolerance and Intolerance
Although survey data identify no significant predictor of intolerance among the Russian population, young people are considered to display heightened levels of ethnic intolerance and radical variants of xenophobia. Drawing on survey and semi-structured interview data from a study of patriotism among young people in two cities in the North-West region of Russia, this article explores the strength of ethnic self-identification and ethnically exclus…
Politics are Bollocks’: Youth, Politics and Activism in Contemporary Europe
This introductory article introduces the MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement) project, the findings of which are the basis of the articles in this volume. MYPLACE maps the relationship between political heritage, current levels and forms of civic and political engagement of young people in Europe, and their potential receptivity to radical and populist political agendas. In this introductory article, the implications of …
Loud and Proud: Youth and the Politics of Silencing
This article considers negative or critical views towards democracy and politics among young people, including supporters of ultra-patriotic or populist radical right movements, in the UK, eastern Germany and Russia. These countries represent a range of political heritages and current constitutions of democracy but, in all three contexts, it is suggested, young people experience some degree of the closing down of 'legitimate' political discourse …
Series editor's foreword
This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employmen…
‘Their way or no way’: Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments
This chapter critically evaluates characterisations of the EDL as ‘Islamophobic’. It outlines debates about how we might define and measure ‘Islamophobia’, focusing on the question of whether Islamophobia is a new, and distinct, phenomenon or consists primarily in anti-Muslim attitudes, which are adequately understood within the existing notion of cultural racism. It provides a detailed exploration of the nature and content of perceptions of, and…
Political science (38 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Law (29 works) · Politics (24 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Ethnography (10 works) · Social science (10 works)