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In this short article, we call for policy makers, activists and academics to take account of food aesthetics of economically and racially marginalised people – especially women – when understanding and intervening in food distribution. Although it may seem that aesthetics and poverty are mutually exclusive, and somewhat provocative to suggest that food aesthetics, when understood more expansively, aesthetics is an important aspect of domestic food work, as our findings from our research with British Bangladeshi women from Tower Hamlets on low incomes and responsible for social reproductive labour in their families and communities attest. We draw inspiration from feminist philosophy of food and taste, and everyday domestic aesthetics. Reflecting on our data, we combine these philosophies with Krishnendu Ray’s critique of food sociologists who imagine that people on low incomes lack a sense of beauty because their lives are dominated by their life of suffering. To conclude, we propose that food aesthetics should become part of the politics of food distribution and rights.
Intergenerational emotions highlight the feelings that we have for our ancestors and descendants, drawing attention to a lineage of feeling and its temporalities. This article revisits the idea of intergenerational emotions as a conceptual tool and methodological approach that is used to explore how we grapple with feelings that persist across time, and which draws attention to the importance of temporalities in shaping social structures and emotional practices. It particularly positions the family as a key site where ideas of emotion and temporality are negotiated, and so to generating intergenerational emotions as a historical and cultural construct. To illustrate this discussion, it uses the example of family history making in an exhibition by the Windrush Generation Legacy Association.
How are problems of family/friend care framed and politicized, and with what socio-political implications? This feminist rhetorical analysis examines how carers are positioned, how problems and solutions of care are framed, and how carers’ social and political rights are supported by Canadian caregiver organizations. Organizations’ public materials draw on and expand narratives that foreground individual risk and recognition, decentring the state’s role. We elaborate on how carers’ citizenship rights are discursively bounded with proposed individualized solutions that support them in continuing to care. Broader narratives could consider carers’ human or citizenship rights or otherwise foreground relationality and complex collective care solidarities.
Sexual harassment is an affective, embodied and relational issue with distinctly gendered consequences for those who experience it. Despite a vast literature illuminating the gendered dynamics of sexual harassment, detailed analyses of the affective dimensions of such dynamics are scarce. This article analyses young women’s and nonbinary people’s experiences of sexual harassment from the perspective of affective embodiment. The analysis draws on Sara Ahmed’s theorisation on embodied hurts, orientations and emotions to trace relational, embodied and affective processes of gendering linked with sexual harassment. The analysis identifies two harassment-related embodied processes: embodied regulation and embodied resistance. Whereas embodied regulation takes the form of feminisation – a process that renders bodies vulnerable – embodied resistance includes a variety of orientations labelled here as preparedness, defeminisation and embodied critique. Thus, the analysis suggests that bodies may respond to sexual harassment in varied ways, and even though harassment contributes to the constant shaping of bodies, it does not determine them.
Legal responses to domestic abuse have been a political priority of the UK Government since at least 2010, eventually leading to the passing of the seminal legislation in this area for England and Wales, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. However, the exclusion of protection for migrant victim-survivors with precarious immigration statuses under the Act demonstrates a failure in understanding that the experience and risk of domestic abuse differ for these individuals from that of the mainstream, due to their intersectional identities as (predominantly) migrant women. Many migrant victim-survivors still find themselves trapped in abusive situations, as the law fails to safeguard their rights to reside legally should they choose to present themselves to authorities by reporting their abuse. A distinct lack of acknowledgment as to inequalities faced by those at the intersection of migrant status and gender (Crenshaw, 1989; 1991) has led to increased insecurity for some of the most vulnerable. This article shines a light on this discrimination under the law in England and Wales. It adopts an intersectionality framework to examine such inequality, analysing Appendix Violence Domestic Abuse and the Migrant Victim Domestic Abuse Concession in UK immigration law, as well as the Support for Migrant Victims Pilot and its relevant Evaluation Report, against the international standards of the Istanbul Convention. It argues that the UK Government is failing to tackle the problem of migrant victim-survivors’ protection concerning domestic abuse, and in some situations, has made it worse.This article aims to state the law as of 1 May 2024.
Engaging healthcare users and families in health research studies as partners – rather than as ‘research subjects’ in the traditional sense – is a growing trend in healthcare. This article is based on interviews with mothers of children with disabilities who partner in research studies on behalf of their children. For these mothers, participating in research is an identity-building activity that (1) builds on and validates their caregiving roles and (2) introduces new personal and professional possibilities for the future.
This article explores contemporary tensions between care and control dynamics within social work practice through the analysis of UK immigration and counter-terrorism policies. Drawing from qualitative research conducted to examine the impact of ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF), a legal condition for those subject to immigration control, alongside the PREVENT agenda, designed to identify those at risk of radicalisation, this article explores the violent consequences created in this context. Understanding social work as biopolitical, we utilise the concept of entanglement to interrogate how these policies are enacted within UK social work and the effect this has on the individuals and communities subject to them. By exploring the interplay of care and control within NRPF and PREVENT policies, we conclude that the ability of social workers to act in an anti-racist manner is detrimentally impacted by the entanglement of neo-colonial violence, the criminalisation of safeguarding and a politics of confusion.
This article analyses how universal parenting courses for first-time parents in Danish municipalities represent measures to cultivate parents’ skills in ‘how to parent’. The aim of such courses is to support all new parents in the transition to parenthood, to teach parents about early child development, and to guide parents in managing their emotions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, we address how the courses end up addressing a particular form of parenting (risk attuned, educated, science based) as well as a particular kind of parental self (reflective, responsible, sensible). We discuss how a therapeutic grammar imposes a new conformity on parents, and how neuro-claims form the basis for recommendations about child development and parent-child interactions. We also critically assess how mothers, in particular, are encouraged to work on and manage their maternal selves.
