J Welsh
Biographic Data
| ID | 47599 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Welsh |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Welsh |
| SIGNATURE | WELSH J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7136-1001 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Miller Versus College of Policing: The Rise of a New Corporatism in British Politics
The College of Policing coordinates recruitment, training, and the production of ‘guidance’ for the police forces of England and Wales. In the case of Miller versus College of Policing, it was explicitly censured by the High Court, and the undemocratic implications of its illegal guidance condemned. This article investigates how this failure happened, what role interest groups have played, and how the College’s administrative architecture is impl…
Reluctant middlemen: The imaginary of defense requirements engineering
Tukhta: Labour and resistance in the audit regime of the Soviet Gulag
Working from the memoir literature of Soviet Gulag survivors, the article explores the curious practice of tukhta as contrived by the toiling zeks of the archipelago. In a labour regime tasked with accumulating surplus, destroying political dissent, and transforming the subjectivity of the imprisoned, tukhta proved to be a tactical means for resisting the logic of Gulag as an audit regime. The subtle labour control of numbers effected by Gulag de…
Civitas sine suffragio: A new (old) concept for critical geopolitics
The concept of civitas sine suffragio captures how accumulation regimes generate threshold-spaces of dispossession and inclusive exclusion through the environment-making state’s production of space. From an archaeo-genetic investigation of the frontier of the Roman imperium, the article suggests the concept as a recurrent technique of economic inclusion and political exclusion in the state’s production of space across modes of production. As part…
The Hall-Colley Debate: A Stop on the Road to the 1619 Project
The publication of the 1619 Project in 2019 by the New York Times Magazine has proved to be a discursive pivot for historiographic debate over the place of liberty, justice and servitude in the social history of the USA. Discussion around this event has been focused and intense, but little has been done to situate the Project in either a wider field of historical sociology or a longer trajectory in the discourses of social and political history. …
Why Historians Will End Capitalism
Though the prospect seems a million miles away, interest in the end of capitalism has been as longstanding as it is utopian, but do we really understand what we mean when we speak of the end of capitalism? Maybe we have things the wrong way round, and in our understandable preoccupation with the future we fail to appreciate how prospective ends often lie in the past. While the expression might refer to practices, experiences, and real social rela…
Service Labor, Freedom, and the Technique of Tipping
Tipping has been a legally recognized form of labor remuneration in the United States for many decades, but it is experiencing a resurgence outside of its usual confines in the hospitality sector. The proliferation of the practice is bound to the long-term economic shift into services, as well as the more recent expansion of the gig economy. Tipping informalizes the wage relation, incentivizes the worker in precarity, and internalizes social rela…
The European Super League debacle: Why regulation of corporate football is essential
On 18 April 2021, 12 European football clubs collectively issued a letter of intent to form a new European Super League. This attempted coup was strongly opposed across English football. Afterwards, the responsible owner-oligarchs were singled out for special criticism from pundits and supporter organizations alike. What emerged was a focus upon the personal greed and social indifference of those individuals, but what was less forthcoming in the …
City-State Britain: A Counter-Narrative to 'Brexit
The incipient crisis of the British state, which seems so apparent in ‘Brexit’, the move towards Scottish Independence, and the succession of minority governments, ought to be understood as a historical conjuncture. This conjuncture has entailed a profound reconfiguration of the social relations that constitute the British state-territory in the context of the world-system, making of it something as geographical as it is historical. Understanding…
Stratifying academia: Ranking, oligarchy and the market‐myth in academic audit regimes
This historical materialist analysis places rankings into the imperatives both to govern and to accumulate, and positions academic ranking in particular as the telos of a more general audit culture. By identifying how rankings effect not merely a quantification of qualities, but a numeration of quantities, we can expose how state governments, managerial strata and political elites achieve socially stratifying political objectives that actually fr…
A power-critique of academic rankings: Beyond managers, institutions, and positivism
The bulk of research on academic rankings is policy-oriented, preoccupied with ‘best practices’, and seems incapable of transcending the normative discourse of ‘governance’. To understand, engage, and properly critique the operation of power in academic rankings, the rankings discourse needs to escape the gravity of ‘police science’ and embrace a properly political science of ranking. More specifically, the article identifies three pillars of the…
Tolling academics: Rent-seeking and gatekeeping in the university space
Assuming the 'neoliberalisation' of academic life to be axiomatic, this article delves into the operations of its political economy with the aim of expanding critical vocabularies, analytical categories and research trajectories. In particular, it indicates where an immanent critique of neoliberal academia can be begun. While the capitalist transformations of academic life are justified by ideological claims eulogising 'production', 'competition'…
Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-Covid-19 audit regimes
Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but…
Subjectivising academics: The ranking apparatus, social transformation, and a 'crisis of subjectivity
Understanding the ‘Tipped Minimum Wage’: Critical Directions for US Policy Research
With the ‘gig economy’ moving to the forefront of research on service labour, interest has heightened in the techniques of labour control that reproduce it. Taking tipping as just such a technique, this article explores critically the policy research around ‘tipped’ employment in the United States. In the United States, tipping is a legally recognised form of labour remuneration that informalises the wage relation, incentivises the worker in prec…
Dispossessing academics: The shift to 'appropriation' in the governing of academic life
This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the transformation of academic life that is currently taking place under the sign of 'neoliberalization'. The main aim is to differentiate appropriation from exploitation as strategies of surplus labour dispossession, to identify the growth of appropriative techniques in academic life, and to situate the proliferation of such techniques in the broader transformations of global political ec…
Globalizing’ academics? Ranking and appropriation in the transformations of the world-system
In an historical materialist analysis, the article challenges the dominant understanding of global academic rankings as ‘inevitable’ and ‘here to stay’. Instead, rankings are treated as historically transformative ‘tracings’ over the accumulation of capital in the world-system, and thus offer a contingent strategic response to three historical shifts in global political economy: ‘financialization’, displacement of the Core, and an shift to surplu…
Policing Academics: The Arkhè of Transformation in Academic Ranking
This article attempts a properly critical and political analysis of the “police power” immanent to the form and logic of academic rankings, and which is reproduced in the extant academic literature generated around them. In contrast to the democratising claims made of rankings, this police power short-circuits the moment of democratic politics and establishes the basis for the oligarchic power of the State and its status quo. Central in this foun…
Ranking academics: Toward a critical politics of academic rankings
There is a need in academic rankings research for a more critical and political analysis beyond the register of normative global governance studies and the pervasive positivism of new public management that dominates the literature of social policy in the area of higher education and research. Given that academic rankings are powerful topological mechanisms of social transformation, critical theorists have a responsibility to engage with this ext…
The great mistake: How we wrecked public universities and how we can fix them
This book combines two emergent critical perspectives that are apparent in recent writing on the twenty-first century public university, and in so doing it conjures a potent intervention into the g
The Politics of “Parental Co-Habitation”: Austerity, Household, and the Social Evils of Dependency
The household as a social formation is being assigned a renewed function in the provision of social welfare via neoliberal austerity politics. Government inaction regarding housing provision is forcing millions of young adults into “parental co-habitation”. In contrast to the dominant ideological view of the family as a school of liberty through the provision of welfare, this article argues that the dependence of millions of young adults on the p…
Authoritarian governmentality through the global city: Contradictions in the Political Ecology of Historical Capitalism
Over 30 years of strategic reconfiguration, Global Cities have proven themselves productive of metropolitan oligarchies of various hues that dominate the territories of their respective states. Set against the 'ecological contradictions' of historical capitalism, the article presents the Global City formation as a historically particular postdisciplinary technique in the capitalist world-system bound into the ecological contradictions of that sys…
The shadow: Alter-visibility in an empire of the seen
The article interrogates the concept of Multitude in capitalist society and challenges the simple notion of social exclusion as an operative force in contemporary social formations and their spatial dispositions. The Shadow will be offered as a spatial and psychosocial relational horizon of differentiation systemically inscribed into the social architecture, operating under a legitimating discourse of transparency politics. The concept succinctly…
Globalizing’ academics? Ranking and appropriation in the transformations of the world-system
In an historical materialist analysis, the article challenges the dominant understanding of global academic rankings as ‘inevitable’ and ‘here to stay’. Instead, rankings are treated as historically transformative ‘tracings’ over the accumulation of capital in the world-system, and thus offer a contingent strategic response to three historical shifts in global political economy: ‘financialization’, displacement of the Core, and an shift to surplu…
Dispossessing academics: The shift to 'appropriation' in the governing of academic life
This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the transformation of academic life that is currently taking place under the sign of 'neoliberalization'. The main aim is to differentiate appropriation from exploitation as strategies of surplus labour dispossession, to identify the growth of appropriative techniques in academic life, and to situate the proliferation of such techniques in the broader transformations of global political ec…
Authoritarian governmentality through the global city: Contradictions in the Political Ecology of Historical Capitalism
Over 30 years of strategic reconfiguration, Global Cities have proven themselves productive of metropolitan oligarchies of various hues that dominate the territories of their respective states. Set against the 'ecological contradictions' of historical capitalism, the article presents the Global City formation as a historically particular postdisciplinary technique in the capitalist world-system bound into the ecological contradictions of that sys…
Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-Covid-19 audit regimes
Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but…
Policing Academics: The Arkhè of Transformation in Academic Ranking
This article attempts a properly critical and political analysis of the “police power” immanent to the form and logic of academic rankings, and which is reproduced in the extant academic literature generated around them. In contrast to the democratising claims made of rankings, this police power short-circuits the moment of democratic politics and establishes the basis for the oligarchic power of the State and its status quo. Central in this foun…
The European Super League debacle: Why regulation of corporate football is essential
On 18 April 2021, 12 European football clubs collectively issued a letter of intent to form a new European Super League. This attempted coup was strongly opposed across English football. Afterwards, the responsible owner-oligarchs were singled out for special criticism from pundits and supporter organizations alike. What emerged was a focus upon the personal greed and social indifference of those individuals, but what was less forthcoming in the …
A power-critique of academic rankings: Beyond managers, institutions, and positivism
The bulk of research on academic rankings is policy-oriented, preoccupied with ‘best practices’, and seems incapable of transcending the normative discourse of ‘governance’. To understand, engage, and properly critique the operation of power in academic rankings, the rankings discourse needs to escape the gravity of ‘police science’ and embrace a properly political science of ranking. More specifically, the article identifies three pillars of the…
Tolling academics: Rent-seeking and gatekeeping in the university space
Assuming the 'neoliberalisation' of academic life to be axiomatic, this article delves into the operations of its political economy with the aim of expanding critical vocabularies, analytical categories and research trajectories. In particular, it indicates where an immanent critique of neoliberal academia can be begun. While the capitalist transformations of academic life are justified by ideological claims eulogising 'production', 'competition'…
Understanding the ‘Tipped Minimum Wage’: Critical Directions for US Policy Research
With the ‘gig economy’ moving to the forefront of research on service labour, interest has heightened in the techniques of labour control that reproduce it. Taking tipping as just such a technique, this article explores critically the policy research around ‘tipped’ employment in the United States. In the United States, tipping is a legally recognised form of labour remuneration that informalises the wage relation, incentivises the worker in prec…
Ranking academics: Toward a critical politics of academic rankings
There is a need in academic rankings research for a more critical and political analysis beyond the register of normative global governance studies and the pervasive positivism of new public management that dominates the literature of social policy in the area of higher education and research. Given that academic rankings are powerful topological mechanisms of social transformation, critical theorists have a responsibility to engage with this ext…
The Politics of “Parental Co-Habitation”: Austerity, Household, and the Social Evils of Dependency
The household as a social formation is being assigned a renewed function in the provision of social welfare via neoliberal austerity politics. Government inaction regarding housing provision is forcing millions of young adults into “parental co-habitation”. In contrast to the dominant ideological view of the family as a school of liberty through the provision of welfare, this article argues that the dependence of millions of young adults on the p…
Service Labor, Freedom, and the Technique of Tipping
Tipping has been a legally recognized form of labor remuneration in the United States for many decades, but it is experiencing a resurgence outside of its usual confines in the hospitality sector. The proliferation of the practice is bound to the long-term economic shift into services, as well as the more recent expansion of the gig economy. Tipping informalizes the wage relation, incentivizes the worker in precarity, and internalizes social rela…
City-State Britain: A Counter-Narrative to 'Brexit
The incipient crisis of the British state, which seems so apparent in ‘Brexit’, the move towards Scottish Independence, and the succession of minority governments, ought to be understood as a historical conjuncture. This conjuncture has entailed a profound reconfiguration of the social relations that constitute the British state-territory in the context of the world-system, making of it something as geographical as it is historical. Understanding…
The shadow: Alter-visibility in an empire of the seen
The article interrogates the concept of Multitude in capitalist society and challenges the simple notion of social exclusion as an operative force in contemporary social formations and their spatial dispositions. The Shadow will be offered as a spatial and psychosocial relational horizon of differentiation systemically inscribed into the social architecture, operating under a legitimating discourse of transparency politics. The concept succinctly…
The shadow: Alter-visibility in an empire of the seen
The article interrogates the concept of Multitude in capitalist society and challenges the simple notion of social exclusion as an operative force in contemporary social formations and their spatial dispositions. The Shadow will be offered as a spatial and psychosocial relational horizon of differentiation systemically inscribed into the social architecture, operating under a legitimating discourse of transparency politics. The concept succinctly…
Ranking academics: Toward a critical politics of academic rankings
There is a need in academic rankings research for a more critical and political analysis beyond the register of normative global governance studies and the pervasive positivism of new public management that dominates the literature of social policy in the area of higher education and research. Given that academic rankings are powerful topological mechanisms of social transformation, critical theorists have a responsibility to engage with this ext…
The great mistake: How we wrecked public universities and how we can fix them
This book combines two emergent critical perspectives that are apparent in recent writing on the twenty-first century public university, and in so doing it conjures a potent intervention into the g
The Politics of “Parental Co-Habitation”: Austerity, Household, and the Social Evils of Dependency
The household as a social formation is being assigned a renewed function in the provision of social welfare via neoliberal austerity politics. Government inaction regarding housing provision is forcing millions of young adults into “parental co-habitation”. In contrast to the dominant ideological view of the family as a school of liberty through the provision of welfare, this article argues that the dependence of millions of young adults on the p…
Authoritarian governmentality through the global city: Contradictions in the Political Ecology of Historical Capitalism
Over 30 years of strategic reconfiguration, Global Cities have proven themselves productive of metropolitan oligarchies of various hues that dominate the territories of their respective states. Set against the 'ecological contradictions' of historical capitalism, the article presents the Global City formation as a historically particular postdisciplinary technique in the capitalist world-system bound into the ecological contradictions of that sys…
Policing Academics: The Arkhè of Transformation in Academic Ranking
This article attempts a properly critical and political analysis of the “police power” immanent to the form and logic of academic rankings, and which is reproduced in the extant academic literature generated around them. In contrast to the democratising claims made of rankings, this police power short-circuits the moment of democratic politics and establishes the basis for the oligarchic power of the State and its status quo. Central in this foun…
Globalizing’ academics? Ranking and appropriation in the transformations of the world-system
In an historical materialist analysis, the article challenges the dominant understanding of global academic rankings as ‘inevitable’ and ‘here to stay’. Instead, rankings are treated as historically transformative ‘tracings’ over the accumulation of capital in the world-system, and thus offer a contingent strategic response to three historical shifts in global political economy: ‘financialization’, displacement of the Core, and an shift to surplu…
Subjectivising academics: The ranking apparatus, social transformation, and a 'crisis of subjectivity
Understanding the ‘Tipped Minimum Wage’: Critical Directions for US Policy Research
With the ‘gig economy’ moving to the forefront of research on service labour, interest has heightened in the techniques of labour control that reproduce it. Taking tipping as just such a technique, this article explores critically the policy research around ‘tipped’ employment in the United States. In the United States, tipping is a legally recognised form of labour remuneration that informalises the wage relation, incentivises the worker in prec…
Dispossessing academics: The shift to 'appropriation' in the governing of academic life
This article offers a critical theoretical exploration of the transformation of academic life that is currently taking place under the sign of 'neoliberalization'. The main aim is to differentiate appropriation from exploitation as strategies of surplus labour dispossession, to identify the growth of appropriative techniques in academic life, and to situate the proliferation of such techniques in the broader transformations of global political ec…
Stratifying academia: Ranking, oligarchy and the market‐myth in academic audit regimes
This historical materialist analysis places rankings into the imperatives both to govern and to accumulate, and positions academic ranking in particular as the telos of a more general audit culture. By identifying how rankings effect not merely a quantification of qualities, but a numeration of quantities, we can expose how state governments, managerial strata and political elites achieve socially stratifying political objectives that actually fr…
A power-critique of academic rankings: Beyond managers, institutions, and positivism
The bulk of research on academic rankings is policy-oriented, preoccupied with ‘best practices’, and seems incapable of transcending the normative discourse of ‘governance’. To understand, engage, and properly critique the operation of power in academic rankings, the rankings discourse needs to escape the gravity of ‘police science’ and embrace a properly political science of ranking. More specifically, the article identifies three pillars of the…
Tolling academics: Rent-seeking and gatekeeping in the university space
Assuming the 'neoliberalisation' of academic life to be axiomatic, this article delves into the operations of its political economy with the aim of expanding critical vocabularies, analytical categories and research trajectories. In particular, it indicates where an immanent critique of neoliberal academia can be begun. While the capitalist transformations of academic life are justified by ideological claims eulogising 'production', 'competition'…
Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-Covid-19 audit regimes
Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but…
The European Super League debacle: Why regulation of corporate football is essential
On 18 April 2021, 12 European football clubs collectively issued a letter of intent to form a new European Super League. This attempted coup was strongly opposed across English football. Afterwards, the responsible owner-oligarchs were singled out for special criticism from pundits and supporter organizations alike. What emerged was a focus upon the personal greed and social indifference of those individuals, but what was less forthcoming in the …
City-State Britain: A Counter-Narrative to 'Brexit
The incipient crisis of the British state, which seems so apparent in ‘Brexit’, the move towards Scottish Independence, and the succession of minority governments, ought to be understood as a historical conjuncture. This conjuncture has entailed a profound reconfiguration of the social relations that constitute the British state-territory in the context of the world-system, making of it something as geographical as it is historical. Understanding…
Civitas sine suffragio: A new (old) concept for critical geopolitics
The concept of civitas sine suffragio captures how accumulation regimes generate threshold-spaces of dispossession and inclusive exclusion through the environment-making state’s production of space. From an archaeo-genetic investigation of the frontier of the Roman imperium, the article suggests the concept as a recurrent technique of economic inclusion and political exclusion in the state’s production of space across modes of production. As part…
The Hall-Colley Debate: A Stop on the Road to the 1619 Project
The publication of the 1619 Project in 2019 by the New York Times Magazine has proved to be a discursive pivot for historiographic debate over the place of liberty, justice and servitude in the social history of the USA. Discussion around this event has been focused and intense, but little has been done to situate the Project in either a wider field of historical sociology or a longer trajectory in the discourses of social and political history. …
Why Historians Will End Capitalism
Though the prospect seems a million miles away, interest in the end of capitalism has been as longstanding as it is utopian, but do we really understand what we mean when we speak of the end of capitalism? Maybe we have things the wrong way round, and in our understandable preoccupation with the future we fail to appreciate how prospective ends often lie in the past. While the expression might refer to practices, experiences, and real social rela…
Service Labor, Freedom, and the Technique of Tipping
Tipping has been a legally recognized form of labor remuneration in the United States for many decades, but it is experiencing a resurgence outside of its usual confines in the hospitality sector. The proliferation of the practice is bound to the long-term economic shift into services, as well as the more recent expansion of the gig economy. Tipping informalizes the wage relation, incentivizes the worker in precarity, and internalizes social rela…
Tukhta: Labour and resistance in the audit regime of the Soviet Gulag
Working from the memoir literature of Soviet Gulag survivors, the article explores the curious practice of tukhta as contrived by the toiling zeks of the archipelago. In a labour regime tasked with accumulating surplus, destroying political dissent, and transforming the subjectivity of the imprisoned, tukhta proved to be a tactical means for resisting the logic of Gulag as an audit regime. The subtle labour control of numbers effected by Gulag de…
Reluctant middlemen: The imaginary of defense requirements engineering
Miller Versus College of Policing: The Rise of a New Corporatism in British Politics
The College of Policing coordinates recruitment, training, and the production of ‘guidance’ for the police forces of England and Wales. In the case of Miller versus College of Policing, it was explicitly censured by the High Court, and the undemocratic implications of its illegal guidance condemned. This article investigates how this failure happened, what role interest groups have played, and how the College’s administrative architecture is impl…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (14 works) · Economics (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Capitalism (9 works) · Philosophy (6 works)