Chris Allen
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3603738 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Chris Allen |
| PRENOMES | Chris |
| SOBRENOME | Allen |
| ASSINATURA | ALLEN C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Manchester Metropolitan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1296-8989 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 81 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 462 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 81 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1974 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
The lived experience of remembering a ‘good’ interview
Micro-phenomenology is an interview and analysis method for investigating subjective experience. As a research tool, it provides detailed descriptions of brief moments of any type of subjective experience and offers techniques for systematically comparing them. In this article, we use an auto-ethnographic approach to present and explore the method. The reader is invited to observe a dialogue between two authors that illustrates and comments on th…
Contemporary Experiences of Islamophobia in Today’s United Kingdom
In today’s the United Kingdom, Islamophobia is as contested as it is real. Challenging this contestation, this article presents findings from ten small-scale, qualitative studies that seek to evidence and better understand the lived, tangible experience of Islamophobia in real-world spaces. To do so, this article briefly explores the development and incidence of Islamophobia in public and political spaces and how contestation has ensued. From her…
Reconfiguring Islamophobia
Criteria pollutant impacts of volatile chemical products informed by near-field modelling
Diagnosis
The work and relatedness of ties mediated online in supporting long-term condition self-management
The 'care transition' is characterised by reduced state involvement in chronic illness management in response to socio-political movements aimed at meeting the challenges presented by an increased prevalence of chronic illness. Amongst these changes has been online communities' rising importance in everyday interactions and attention is being increasingly paid towards the ways online contacts might contribute to self-management. Whilst research h…
The Deprivation of Theory
It is a privilege to be able to comment on the Focus articles by David Clapham (This issue) and Hannu Ruonavaara (This issue). I want to take this opportunity to comment on three issues that emerge
The Violence of Austerity”
There is now a burgeoning literature on neoliberalism, austerity and growing inequality in the UK. So we are not devoid of empirical detail about what is happening around us. However, the way we co
Crime, Drugs and Social Theory
Do criminal cultures generate drug use? Crime, Drugs and Social Theory critiques conventional academic and policy thinking concerning the relationship between urban deprivation, crime and drug use. Chris Allen outlines an innovative constructionist phenomenological perspective to explore these relationships in a new light. He discusses how people living in deprived urban areas develop ’natural attitudes’ towards activities, such as crime and drug…
Proscribing National Action
In December 2016, the British Government banned National Action for being an extremist organisation. It was the first time in British history that membership of a far‐right group was outlawed. While so, little is known about the group. This article responds to this lack of knowledge by setting out the origins of National Action and its leaders, its preference for a traditionalist Nazi ideology, and its penchant for stunts and demonstrations to ga…
Islamophobia and the Problematization of Mosques
Most scholarly studies have tended to focus on the building of new and proposed mosques, and in particular how they are sites of conflict and contestation symbolic of wider "problems" associated with Muslims and Islam in the United Kingdom. This study focuses on an overlooked aspect within this, the extent to which attacks on mosques that are neither new nor proposed perform a similar symbolic function. Presenting new empirical evidence from rese…
Getting ‘Out There’ and Impacting
The Institute for Housing and Urban Research Housing and Urban Researchers (HURs) are under intensifying pressures to impact on society. Although this orientation towards research impact sits well with “policy oriented” HURs, it has sat less well with some “critical” HURs. It would nevertheless be wrong to paint critical HURs as unconcerned with research impact. Debates about research impact led to the emergence of “critical” Housing and Urban Re…
Food Poverty and Christianity in Britain
The Christian response to food poverty in Britain has generally been two-fold. Foodbanks have become synonymous with Christianity and exemplify its charitable ethos. However, Christian churches have also called for social justice so that people can buy food in the normal way. Both responses are theologically problematic. The idea of foodbank is borne of a privileged theology that celebrates charitable giving, despite the humiliation it invites on…
Gentrification
The title of this book by Kirsteen Paton warms the heart and invokes immediate sympathy. Its focus is on a constituency that is often overlooked in gentrification research – working class people. T
People hate you because of the way you dress’
Chakraborti and Zempi (2012) argued for the need to increase awareness of the gendered facets of Islamophobia in order to shed light on and improve understanding of the overlooked and negated ‘invisible’ victimisation of veiled Muslim women in the public spaces of contemporary western society. In seeking to shed light and improve understanding about this process, this article sets out the findings from a project that interviewed 20 veiled British…
The Islamophobia industry
Without doubt, Islamophobia remains as equally complex as indeed it is contested. Despite this, Klug (2012) is right to note that in recent years the phenomenon has 'come of age'; no longer needing
Controversy, Islam and politics
In September 2012, a video entitled 'Innocence of Muslims' was uploaded to YouTube. The fourteen-minute clip featured actors playing the Prophet Muhammad, his companions and wives, and while production values were amateurish, aided by airings on Egyptian national television and others elsewhere, the video went viral. Recalling the Rushdie affair two decades beforehand, angry protests took place across the world. In the UK, the response from Musli…
Britain First
The British National Party and English Defence League forged new frontiers in British political spaces in relation to anti‐Islam, anti‐Muslim ideologies. Whereas the former sought to do so in formal political arenas, the latter did so as a street‐level movement. With the subsequent waning of both, Britain First has emerged seemingly to fill the political void they left. In many ways, Britain First combines the strategies and actions of the partie…
Anti-Social Networking
With research highlighting the growing incidence of public opposition to the building of mosques and the innovative use of social networking, especially Facebook, to disseminate and garner support for such opposition, a pilot study sought to investigate this in relation to the proposed Dudley "super mosque." Focusing on the Facebook group Stop Dudley Super Mosque and Islamic Village, members were engaged online to explore why they opposed the mos…
A catastrophic lack of inquisitiveness
This article focuses on both the narratives of Project Champion, a surveillance scheme in Birmingham in the UK that saw the installation of 216 closed circuit television and Automated Number Plate Recognition cameras in two areas which contained the greatest concentration of Muslims in the city. Considering the period of time throughout which Project Champion was conceived in 2008, instigated and eventually dismantled by July 2011, this article p…
Passing the Dinner Table Test
Through establishing the All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia and Cross-Government Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hatred, the Coalition government has afforded significance to Islamophobia. Focusing on definition, evidence, and politics, this article considers British governmental policy approaches to tackling Islamophobia over the past 15 years. Tracing religiously based discrimination from the 1980s to the publication of the Runnymede Tr…
Between Political Fad and Political Empowerment
Established in 2008 and launched by the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, the National Muslim Women's Advisory Group (NMWAG) brought together 19 British Muslim women to advise Government on ways to empower Muslim women and increase their participation in civic, economic and social life. This article critically considers the NMWAG as a vehicle for improving how government sought to engage Muslim women within the context of a political and policy …
We don't do God’
Given that Tony Blair was once infamously told by an aide that in Britain ‘we don't do God’, the New Labour Government that he led was responsible for developing and implementing a series of policies that brought religion firmly into British political spaces. Adopting two policy approaches, these approaches focused on ‘religion or belief’ and ‘faith’. Alongside the incorporation of ‘religion and belief’ into the broadening equalities framework, N…
A Welcome Critique
Opposing Islamification or promoting Islamophobia? Understanding the English Defence League
The emergence and growth of the English Defence League (EDL) in the past two years as a socio-political mass movement are unprecedented in the British setting. Initially dismissed and duly condemned as a racist and Islamophobic far-right organization, little is known about the EDL. Allen's article begins by tracing the development of British far-right political groups that were trail-blazers in campaigning against the alleged threat posed by Musl…
Focus Article
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Understanding African politics
Generalisation about African politics and political systems is made difficult by the extent to which African states both differ from one another and have changed since independence. This article discusses whether it is nevertheless possible to understand African states as examples of the same political system, as some recent studies have asserted (or assumed). It argues that by comparing the historical patterns of political development in African…
Opposing Islamification or promoting Islamophobia? Understanding the English Defence League
The emergence and growth of the English Defence League (EDL) in the past two years as a socio-political mass movement are unprecedented in the British setting. Initially dismissed and duly condemned as a racist and Islamophobic far-right organization, little is known about the EDL. Allen's article begins by tracing the development of British far-right political groups that were trail-blazers in campaigning against the alleged threat posed by Musl…
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology and the Body-in-Space Encounters of Visually Impaired Children
In this paper I argue that new social geographies of impairment present a conceptually sophisticated, but limiting, view of the impaired body as a container of social disadvantage. They say much less about how people with impairments routinely exercise agency in everyday life vis-à-vis the restrictive sociospatial circumstances in which they find themselves. I address this problem by developing a phenomenology of visually impaired children's ever…
On the ''Physiological Dope'' Problematic in Housing and Illness Research
The housing and illness literature is fascinating because it represents a key battleground on which social science has waged an empirical war upon its traditional enemies in the natural sciences. However, while this literature is of immense sociological importance, it has yet to attract any theoretical interest from sociologists - despite the recent surge of interest in the sociology of the body. In this article I attempt to fill this lacuna by d…
Ordinary, the Same as Anywhere Else
Urban sociologists are becoming increasingly interested in neighbourhood as a source of middle-class identity. Par ticular emphasis is currently being given to two types of middle-class neighbourhood; gentrified urban neighbourhoods of'distinction' and inconspicuous 'suburban landscapes of privilege'. However, there has been a dear th of work on 'marginal' middle-class neighbourhoods that are similarly 'inconspicuous' rather than distinctive, but…
People hate you because of the way you dress’
Chakraborti and Zempi (2012) argued for the need to increase awareness of the gendered facets of Islamophobia in order to shed light on and improve understanding of the overlooked and negated ‘invisible’ victimisation of veiled Muslim women in the public spaces of contemporary western society. In seeking to shed light and improve understanding about this process, this article sets out the findings from a project that interviewed 20 veiled British…
Desperately seeking fusion
This paper argues that social welfare research on joined-up thinking is underpinned bytwo theses. The 'systemic move' thesis suggests that joined-up thinking is needed to fill gaps in welfare service provision arising from a lack of inter-organizational coordination. The 'epistemological move' thesis advises that joined-up thinking is needed to overcome deficiencies in the institutional division and distribution of welfare knowledge. Both theses …
Warfare, endemic violence & state collapse in Africa
African politics in the nineties have been marked by a series of violent breakdowns of order, and in some cases the disappearance of the central state, in a large number of states. Attempts at the analysis of this phenomenon have involved several different but complementary approaches, notably those invoking globalisation, the economics of ‘new’ war, the crisis of the neopatrimonial state, or social and cultural factors as keys to explanation. Th…
Who needs civil society
‘Civil society’ has become a popular concept in both the analysis of the social bases of recent political change in Africa, and in external policy support for processes of liberal democratic political reform. In the latter case, civil society, as represented by a set of (largely urban) formal organisations and especially by NGOs with external links, is portrayed as the driving force behind and guarantee of democratisation and the containment of t…
Restructuring an authoritarian state
Benin was an early example of transition from single‐party rule to competitive multi‐party politics, achieved through high levels of popular urban mobilisation in 1989–90. This article analyses the causes of the downfall of the former regime, attributing it to the erosion of state capacity and strength and to growing corruption, together with the expansion in the scope and strength of civil society and changes in consciousness arising from politi…
Britain First
The British National Party and English Defence League forged new frontiers in British political spaces in relation to anti‐Islam, anti‐Muslim ideologies. Whereas the former sought to do so in formal political arenas, the latter did so as a street‐level movement. With the subsequent waning of both, Britain First has emerged seemingly to fill the political void they left. In many ways, Britain First combines the strategies and actions of the partie…
A catastrophic lack of inquisitiveness
This article focuses on both the narratives of Project Champion, a surveillance scheme in Birmingham in the UK that saw the installation of 216 closed circuit television and Automated Number Plate Recognition cameras in two areas which contained the greatest concentration of Muslims in the city. Considering the period of time throughout which Project Champion was conceived in 2008, instigated and eventually dismantled by July 2011, this article p…
Social Housing Managers and the Performance Ethos
In sociology, 'the professional project' is understood as a collective endeavour of occupational groups that only succeeds if those groups possess, and control access to, a unique stock of knowledge. Urban sociologists have been critical of public housing managers' collective endeavours to present themselves as a profession because they use generic knowledge and common sense in their work. They also argue that 'the professional project' of housin…
Gentrification 'Research' and the Academic Nobility
This essay is a response to Tom Slater's article 'The eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research'. My essay addresses two issues. First, I consider the issue of why gentrification research appears to be losing its critical edge. I argue that social position infects understanding and, inevitably therefore, academic knowledge production. Thus the social proximity of the academic nobility to gentrifiers (and social distance betwe…
Islamophobia and the Problematization of Mosques
Most scholarly studies have tended to focus on the building of new and proposed mosques, and in particular how they are sites of conflict and contestation symbolic of wider "problems" associated with Muslims and Islam in the United Kingdom. This study focuses on an overlooked aspect within this, the extent to which attacks on mosques that are neither new nor proposed perform a similar symbolic function. Presenting new empirical evidence from rese…
Bourdieu's Habitus, Social Class and the Spatial Worlds of Visually Impaired Children
This paper argues that the 'new' social geographies of impairment literature present a sophisticated analysis of the socio-spatiality of the impaired body, but one that now needs developing in two ways. First, it is suggested that the literature has focused on the embodiment of socio-spatial exclusion more than it has focused on resistance to it. Secondly, where the literature has analysed resistance to socio-spatial exclusion, it has done so in …
Down With Multiculturalism, Book-burning and Fatwas’
Since the 7/7 London bombings, much has been said about the end and at times, the 'death' of multiculturalism in both the public and political spaces. Considering whether much of this discourse is little more than a thinly veiled discourse about the presence, role and responsibilities of Muslims in today's Britain, the paper takes the findings of the 1997 Runnymede Report into Islamophobia and uses this as a premise from which to explore those ar…
Reflections on Housing and Social Theory
Journal articles that draw upon social theory to tackle housing issues almost invariably contain reference to the pioneering and hugely influential work of Jim Kemeny, who took early retirement fro
The Communities We Are Regaining but Need to Lose
Michael Young and Gerard Lemos' (1997 Young, M. and Lemos, G. 1997. The communities we have lost and can regain, London: Lemos and Crane. [Google Scholar]) text The communities we have lost and can regain has had a substantial influence on New Labour's communitarian thinking. This paper critically examines a specific aspect of New Labour's communitarian agenda, namely, its use of public housing policy to rebuild communities in order to combat soc…
The policy and implementation of the housing role in community care—a constructionist theoretical perspective
This paper contends that academic analysts, working within the discipline of ‘housing studies’, have misrepresented the meaning and significance of the housing role in community care, and that this has resulted from their unwillingness to utilise an explicit multi‐disciplinary and theoretical approach to its study. The first half of this paper attempts to provide a new and alternative definition of housing's community care role by locating its an…
We don't do God’
Given that Tony Blair was once infamously told by an aide that in Britain ‘we don't do God’, the New Labour Government that he led was responsible for developing and implementing a series of policies that brought religion firmly into British political spaces. Adopting two policy approaches, these approaches focused on ‘religion or belief’ and ‘faith’. Alongside the incorporation of ‘religion and belief’ into the broadening equalities framework, N…
The Fallacy of “Housing Studies”
The idea of “Housing Studies” is parasitic on the notion that it is “theoretically informed” or, at least, undertaken using “research methodologies” that allow “valid generalizations” to be made in one form or another. But what does this mean and what are the epistemological implications of such a position? The implication of this position is that “Housing Studies” constitutes a superior form of “finding out about” and “knowing” housing phenomena…
Of Urban Entrepreneurs or 24-Hour Party People? City-Centre Living in Manchester, England
My purpose in this paper is to provide a fuller account of the origins and nature of city-centre living in Manchester, England, by emphasising its too-often neglected 'independent' and 'countercultural' underside. Some urban policy researchers have made too much of the 'entrepreneurial turn' in Manchester, which is said to have been a key catalyst of its city-centre renaissance and city-centre living. My own empirical work as well as that of some…
Africa & the drugs trade
(1999). Africa & the drugs trade. Review of African Political Economy: Vol. 26, No. 79, pp. 5-11
Radical Africana
Current Africana no.23
Obituary
The distribution of lithic materials of possible Mesolithic age on the Isle of Arran
Details are presented of 22 findspots in southern Arran which have produced pitchstone and flint materials. Although a microlithic component can be distinguished at 3 locations, most of the material is less diagnostic culturally. Radiocarbon dates are presented from two sites (in the late 7th and 6th millennia and in the 2nd millennium BC respectively), the distribution of locations is discussed and some finds are illustrated
State, society and the African crisis
The African State in Transition. Edited by Zaki Ergas, London: Macmillan. 1987. 340pp. £29.50hb The Precarious Balance: state and society in Africa. Edited by Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. 1988. 357pp. £27.95hb Africa: what can be done?. Ben Turok, London: Zed Press. 1987. 181pp. £23.95hb/£6.95pb Revolution and Counter‐Revolution in Africa. Nzongola‐Ntalaja, London: Zed Press. 1987. 130pp. £23.95hb/£6.95pb P…
Surviving democracy
Restructuring an authoritarian state
Benin was an early example of transition from single‐party rule to competitive multi‐party politics, achieved through high levels of popular urban mobilisation in 1989–90. This article analyses the causes of the downfall of the former regime, attributing it to the erosion of state capacity and strength and to growing corruption, together with the expansion in the scope and strength of civil society and changes in consciousness arising from politi…
Recent publications in Scottish government and politics
The list below covers material omitted from previous listings, and material published since the last list, in the period 1.6.84 to 31.5.85. Where a publisher is not specified, the publisher and author are the same. I would be grateful to be told of any errors or omissions. To make it easier to obtain theses on inter-library loan, I have included where possible the British Library (Lending Division) or University Microfilm numbers; these should be…
Current Africana 1992/3
Mismatch in the Housing Market
An economic model is presented of the rise of mortgage arrears and possessions. This indicates that the normal level of possessions is around 30 000 dwellings per year, but that between 1990 and 1996 an additional 300 000 households will exit the owner-occupied housing market. This short-term but substantial outflow from the owner-occupied housing market is producing a mismatch between empty dwellings remaining unsold and growing queues for accom…
Democracy, development and defence
Understanding African politics
Generalisation about African politics and political systems is made difficult by the extent to which African states both differ from one another and have changed since independence. This article discusses whether it is nevertheless possible to understand African states as examples of the same political system, as some recent studies have asserted (or assumed). It argues that by comparing the historical patterns of political development in African…
The cunning of conflict
This issue was not planned and commissioned around a single theme, but is drawn from submitted articles (as one issue in each volume usually is). There is however one thread that links three of the main articles: the complexity of the politics of conflict in post-cold war Africa. While each of Reno, Harrison and Sesay have a distinct and different central theme, they are concerned with the ways in which actors exploit or depend upon violent confl…
Zaïre, South Africa
(1997). Zaire, South Africa: moving forward? Review of African Political Economy: Vol. 24, No. 72, pp. 165-170
Who needs civil society
‘Civil society’ has become a popular concept in both the analysis of the social bases of recent political change in Africa, and in external policy support for processes of liberal democratic political reform. In the latter case, civil society, as represented by a set of (largely urban) formal organisations and especially by NGOs with external links, is portrayed as the driving force behind and guarantee of democratisation and the containment of t…
The policy and implementation of the housing role in community care—a constructionist theoretical perspective
This paper contends that academic analysts, working within the discipline of ‘housing studies’, have misrepresented the meaning and significance of the housing role in community care, and that this has resulted from their unwillingness to utilise an explicit multi‐disciplinary and theoretical approach to its study. The first half of this paper attempts to provide a new and alternative definition of housing's community care role by locating its an…
The competition effects of the Single Market in Europe
European Single Market How the programme has fostered competition The reduction in trade barriers in Europe through the Single Market Programme (SMP) was intended to increase competition in European markets, and hence welfare and efficiency. The paper examines how the SMP has affected trade patterns and what can be learnt from this regarding the impact on competitive behaviour. Combining an econometric and computable general equilibrium methodolo…
Britain's Africa policy
The machinery of external control
With the end of the cold war, the US lost one key element of its Africa policy, containment of communism, though another remains ensuring sufficient control over African economies and economic policy that US interests are thereby served. As with much of US Africa policy, such control is exerted increasingly through intermediary bodies. In the initial post-independence decades the chosen intermediary was often a metropolitan power or even an Afric…
Political change and local objectives
In this article, we argue that the spatial reorganization of local government structures may pose a significant threat to fragile local cultures. A recognition at the national level that policy structures are culturally specific (and not converging) is not always conceded at the very local level. Drawing on observations from Wales, we show how political change brings the danger of cultural neglect
Towards a Comparative Sociology of Residence and Disablement - Britain and Sweden in Interventionist Welfare Regime Perspective
In the first part of this paper, I developed the interventionist model of disability and, from this, interventionist regime theory. In this part of the paper, my empirical application of these conceptual models will enable me to refute the ?total change? and ?total statis? discourses in British housing and community care research, and the latent convergence that I have shown to predominate in divergent ?welfare regime? theorizing. I will achieve …
Disablism in Housing and Comparative Community Care Discourse - Towards an Interventionist Model of Disability and Interventionist Welfare Regime Theory
This paper is presented in two parts. In this part I provide a critique of the socio-biological essentialism that infuses the community care discourses in ?housing studies? and ?comparative studies?. I argue that this biological essentialism has encouraged researchers to accept the common sense assumption that the ?special needs? of disabled people are per se located within the incompetent body/mind. The effect of this has resulted in the constru…
Africa & the drugs trade
(1999). Africa & the drugs trade. Review of African Political Economy: Vol. 26, No. 79, pp. 5-11
Warfare, endemic violence & state collapse in Africa
African politics in the nineties have been marked by a series of violent breakdowns of order, and in some cases the disappearance of the central state, in a large number of states. Attempts at the analysis of this phenomenon have involved several different but complementary approaches, notably those invoking globalisation, the economics of ‘new’ war, the crisis of the neopatrimonial state, or social and cultural factors as keys to explanation. Th…
Interrelated Factor Demands from Dynamic Cost Functions
In this paper we propose a dynamic cost function which allows us consistently to derive a set of dynamic interrelated factor demand equations in the general error correction form introduced by Anderson and Blundell (1982). This paper expands results recently published in Urga (1996). It shows that the derivation of an effective underlying cost function allows us to identify the full set of parameters of the underlying process. This does not happe…
Sociology (62 obras) · Political science (61 obras) · Law (47 obras) · Law (39 obras) · Politics (33 obras) · Economics (30 obras) · Epistemology (27 obras) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (21 obras) · Social science (19 obras) · Philosophy (18 obras)