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 a Kristevan abject paradigm risks reproducing, rather than challenging, histories of violent disgust towards maternal bodies. In place of the Kristevan model of the abject, it argues for a more thoroughly social and political account of abjection. This entails a critical shift from the current feminist theoretical preoccupation with the `transgressive potentiality' of `encounters with the abject' to a consideration of consequences of being abject within specific social and political locations

Impact as Odyssey

Within the context of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), academic labor is being tagged to ‘impact’: to demonstrable outputs that go beyond academia and benefit “the wider economy and society” (HEFCE, 2009, 13; see also Rogers et al., this issue). This move is certainly not new, nor is it unique to institutions of higher education in the UK. ‘Impact statements’ have been standard in funding proposals for quite a while, grant funded projects have long required evidence of application within the communities where research occurs and, in the US, ‘service’ to institutional, professional, and broader communities is well established as one of the metrics used in governing promotion and tenure processes. In this intervention, we reflect on our experience working on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project where questions of impact – understood as efforts to engage participants and to produce applied results – were an ongoing concern. We offer a vision that recognizes that producing impact in research is a complicated process where alternatives to what some describe as the “wholesale neoliberalization of knowledge production” (Jazeel, 2010, np) might potentially be realized. More specifically, we offer an allegorical rendering of impact as odyssey

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 formed and legitimated. To this end, in this article we adopt a ‘cultural political economy’ (Jessop, 2010; Sum & Jessop, 2013) approach to examine the co-production of the Welfare Reform Act (2012), (and in particular the Household Benefits Cap element of this legislation), and the cultural and political crafting of “benefit brood” families within the wider public sphere, to examine the mechanisms through which anti-welfare sentiments are produced and mediated. Our analysis begins with the case of Mick Philpott, who was found guilty in 2013 of the manslaughter of six of his children. We will show how this case activated ‘mechanisms of consent’ (Hall et al. 1978) around ideas of acceptable family forms, welfare reform and parental responsibility. Through this case-study, we seek to demonstrate how anti-welfare commonsense is fundamentally dependent upon wider cultural representational practices, through which those who claim welfare come to be constituted as undeserving and morally repugnant, to the extent that the very concept of ‘claiming welfare’ is reconceived within the social imaginary as debauched. Figures such as ‘benefits broods’, we argue, operate both as technologies of control (through which to manage precariat populations), but also as technologies of consent through which a wider and deeper anti-welfare commonsense is effected

Against aspiration

A short piece on the adoption of the political rhetoric of 'aspiration' by the left in contemporary British politics, for a report published by the think tank, the Centre for Labour and Social Studie

Stigma:The Machinery of Inequality

In this radical reconceptualisation Tyler precisely and passionately outlines the political function of stigma as an instrument of state coercion. Through an original social and economic reframing of the history of stigma, Tyler reveals stigma as a political practice, illuminating previously forgotten histories of resistance against stigmatization, boldly arguing that these histories provide invaluable insights for understanding the rise of authoritarian forms of government today

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 practices (legal, social, moral) through which populations are controlled and fashioned. This article begins with the 1981 Nationality Act and the violent conflicts between the police and black communities in Brixton that accompanied the passage of the Act through the British parliament. Employing Michel Foucault's concept of state racism, it argues that the 1981 Nationality Act marked a pivotal moment in the design of British citizenship and has operated as the template for a glut of subsequent nationality legislation that has shaped who can achieve citizenship. The central argument is that the existence of populations of failed citizens within Britain is not an accident of flawed design, but is foundational to British citizenship. For many 'national minorities' the lived realities of biopolitical citizenship stand in stark contradistinction to contemporary governmental accounts of citizenship that stress community cohesion, political participation, social responsibility, rights and pride in shared national belonging

Lancaster Black History Group : Anti-Racist Education after the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests

This article examines the work of Lancaster Black History Group (LBHG), a community history collective that was formed in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests with the aim of “fighting racism through education.” It foregrounds the radical political roots of Black British History (BBH), a public history movement concerned with recovering hidden histories in support of grassroots struggles for racial justice. It details the vibrant exchange between grassroots antiracism, community arts and education, and historical scholarship that characterises BBH. It then explores how LBHG developed this approach by employing participatory research methods to reconstruct the historical ties of a majority-white Northern English city to Atlantic slavery, colonialism and industrial capitalism. In conclusion, it argues that durational forms of anti-racist education can help nurture communities of resistance against the ultranationalist xenophobia of the current political moment

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 its publication. Given its considerable influence, it is surprising how little sustained engagement there has been with the historicity of Goffman's account. This article resituates Goffman's conceptualisation of stigma within the historical context of Jim Crow and the Black freedom struggles that were shaking 'the social interaction order' to its foundations at the very moment he crafted his account. It is the contention of this article that these explosive political movements against the 'humiliations of racial discrimination' invite revision of Goffman's decidedly apolitical account of stigma. This historical revision of Goffman's stigma concept builds on an existing body of critical work on the relationship between race, segregation and the epistemology of sociology within the USA. Throughout, it reads Goffman's Stigma through the lens of 'Black Sociology', a field of knowledge that here designates not only formal sociological scholarship, but political manifestos, journalism, creative writing, oral histories and memoirs. It is the argument of this article that placing Goffman's concept of stigma into critical dialogue with Black epistemologies of stigma allows for a timely reconceptualisation of stigma as governmental technologies of dehumanisation that have long been collectively resisted from below