97 FIVE Difference and recognition The shooting deaths of several young Black men between 1988 and 2007 were integral events in the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The shootings produced a spectrum of affects for those working to develop the school. This affective spectrum would coalesce with other feelings of empowerment and safety produced by the governing and patterned sequences of neoliberalism and biopolitics. This affective amalgam would serve as a powerful catalyst in the development of the school and in the fight against Black
This book focuses on the changing terrain of ethnic disadvantage in Britain, drawing on up-to-date sources. It goes further than texts that merely describe ethnic inequalities to explore and explain their dynamic nature. It suggests that the increasing diversity of experience among different ethnic groups is a key to understanding continuing and emerging tensions and conflicts.
Explaining ethnic differences: provides up to date data and analysis of ethnic diversity and changing patterns of disadvantage in Britain;
· covers key areas of social life, including demographic trends, education, employment, housing, health, gender, and policing and community disorder;
· is written by leading experts in the field;
· addresses issues of urgent public importance in the context of recent community disorder and the resurgence of the far right.
· The book is essential reading for policy makers in central and local government; academics, postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates in the social sciences; social work, health, education and housing professionals; and criminal justice personnel.
25 TWO Difference within difference This chapter focuses on individuals, households, and larger groups, to review the character and impact of difference in housing. We consider how people relate to the home as well as their housing strategies. Background is provided by a summary of some socioeconomic and demographic trends, and we also keep in mind the constraints bearing upon households. Consequently we take up again the agency/structure relationships introduced in Chapter One. Nonetheless, it is agency which now mainly preoccupies us, since fuller discussion
Issues of ‘difference’ are on the agenda right across the social sciences, and are encountered daily by practitioners in policy fields. A central question is how the welfare state and its institutions respond to impairment, ethnicity and gender. This book provides an invaluable overview of key issues set in the context of housing.
Touching on concerns ranging from minority ethnic housing needs to the housing implications of domestic violence, this broad-ranging study shows how difference is regulated in housing. It deploys a distinctive theoretical perspective which is applicable to other aspects of the welfare state, and bridges the agency/structure divide.
Housing, social policy and difference: brings disability, ethnicity and gender into the centre of an analysis of housing policies and practices; offers a new approach to housing, informed by recent theoretical debates about agency, structure and diversity; develops the ideas of ‘difference within difference’ and ‘social regulation’; looks beyond the concerns of postmodernism to create an original account of difference and structure within the welfare state.
The book will be an important text for students and researchers in housing, social policy, planning, urban studies, sociology, disability studies, gender studies and ethnic relations. It will also interest practitioners committed to greater equalities of opportunities and a fairer society.
For vulnerable older, disabled or homeless people who need accommodation and support, many different forms of housing have developed – whether hostels, group homes, extra-care housing or retirement villages. But do these settings effectively improve the well-being of those who live in them? This important book explores the impact of different forms of policy and practice on the lives of vulnerable people, arguing for a flexible policy approach that places people in control of their own lives. It puts forward an original evaluation framework and applies this to case studies of provision in Britain and Sweden – two countries with long and differing experiences – to raise interesting and important issues for the future. The book will be a valuable resource for those working in and devising policy for supported housing as well as students on urban studies and planning courses and those studying health and social care subjects who wish to better understand the nature of supported housing.
129 SIX Identity, difference and citizenship: a fraying tapestry? We can choose our welfare future. We are not simply buffeted around by economic winds, nor do we stand helpless in the face of ‘one-way’ evolutionary social forces. (Horton and Gregory, 2009: 76) Introduction Thus far, this book has principally focused on the relationship between rising material inequality, welfare austerity and social citizenship. This chapter goes further to explore the gendered and racialised character of citizenship and its relation to rising structural inequality in
therefore important to how we can effectively practice solidarity in social movements, particularly when these movements have become increasingly formalized. In the following sections, I draw together some of the elements of my colleagues’ accounts of their feminist activist identities to explore the constraints and possibilities of engaging in activism through difference. The remainder of Part IV is structured like a spiral: starting at the widest point of intersection with external stakeholders, narrowing the focus to within the collective, and finally looking at
Why is it hard to know if you are making a difference in public services? What can you do about it?
Public services throughout the world face the challenge of tackling complex issues where multiple factors influence change. This book sets out practical and theoretically robust, tried and tested approaches to understanding and tracking change that any organisation can use to ensure it makes a difference to the people it cares about.
With case studies from health, community, research, international development and social care, this book shows that with the right tools and techniques, public services can track their contribution to social change and become more efficient and effective.
191 EIGHT The accommodation of difference This book has reviewed ‘difference’ in housing contexts, and touched on relationships with markets, paternalism, inequalities, and discourses about dependencies and economic life. Theoretically-led general analyses of housing policy remain scarce (see Dickens et al, 1985; Kemeny, 1992; King, 1996), and our study has broken new ground. The analysis has messages applicable beyond housing, offering perspectives on the welfare state in general. Exper iential diversity can be brought more comprehensively into accounts of
