Weekly real-life magazines (RLMs) for women form a genre that has experienced sustained popularity for more than three decades and are constructed from claims to represent their readerships’ lives. Strikingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic where other magazines have witnessed a decline in sales and many closures, real-life titles have experienced an increase in readership ( Print Power, 2020 ). Yet despite their evident popularity, there has been no scholarship undertaken on this genre. In what follows, I argue that RLMs are important cultural texts that
Weekly real-life magazines (RLMs) for women form a genre that has experienced sustained popularity for more than three decades and are constructed from claims to represent their readerships’ lives. Strikingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic where other magazines have witnessed a decline in sales and many closures, real-life titles have experienced an increase in readership ( Print Power, 2020 ). Yet despite their evident popularity, there has been no scholarship undertaken on this genre. In what follows, I argue that RLMs are important cultural texts that
Bad parenting is so often blamed for Britain’s ‘broken society’, manifesting in sites as diverse as the government reaction to the riots of 2011, popular ‘entertainment’ like Supernanny and the discussion boards of Mumsnet.
This book examines how these pathologising ideas of failing, chaotic and dysfunctional families are manufactured across media, policy and public debate and how they create a powerful consensus that Britain is in the grip of a ‘parent crisis’.
It tracks how crisis talk around parenting has been used to police and discipline families who are considered to be morally deficient and socially irresponsible. Most damagingly, it has been used to justify increasingly punitive state policies towards families in the name of making ‘bad parents’ more responsible.
Is the real crisis in our perceptions rather than reality? This is essential reading for anyone engaged in policy and popular debate around parenting.
Visually and pedagogically rich, this wide-ranging introduction to key concepts and debates in welfare uses an innovative, question-based narrative to highlight the importance of theory to understanding welfare. In particular, it:
• Introduces concepts that are core to how policy is formulated and implemented.
• Provides students with a comprehensive vocabulary and toolkit for analysing policy examples and developing social science arguments.
• Includes stimulus material, diagrams, critical thinking activities, further reading lists and a companion website containing further policy examples, podcasts and class activities.
Written by an experienced and inspiring lecturer, this book is suitablefor undergraduate students of social policy, sociology, politics, public policy, social work, health and social care, particularly those taking courses on ‘welfare theory’,‘principles of social policy’, ‘key issues in welfare policy’ and similar. Using some of the hottest current debates about the problems and benefits of state-funded welfare, this book develops students’ social science understanding and analytic skills.
re-narrated, mediated and circulated 151 within public culture reveals a broader pre-existing architecture of mediations and lay attitudes around the figure of the ‘benefit brood’ that were awakened by this case. ‘Benefit brood’ narratives form a staple of disgust across news media, lifestyle and ‘real life’ magazines, and pseudo-documentary (reality) television. Tracking the movement of ‘benefit brood’ families across these different media sites, we see that the same families are constantly circulating through a cultural economy of disgust; from magazine
:478–9) introduce the idea of benefit brood: ‘Benefit brood’ is a cultural figuration of disgust aimed at families that are deemed to have become ‘excessively’ large as a result of over- generous welfare entitlements; ‘benefit brood’ parents are regarded as almost pathologically fertile in their desire to secure greater amounts of welfare payments by having more and more children. ‘Benefit brood’ narratives form a staple of disgust across news media, lifestyle and ‘real life’ magazines, and pseudo-documentary (reality) television such as the genre of ‘poverty porn’. This
