’ ( Ellis, 1991 feels uncannily risky and dangerous, but, as Yann Martel (2003 : 8) has suggested, ‘It often happens that we do not remember the first time we did something, or even any one particular time but remember only the repetition, the idea that we did the thing over and over’. Drawing on ‘the long history of self-representational writing’ ( Serfaty, 2004 : 1), I offer my narration of having an experience of the neoliberal university as a collective sense/ability of contemporary academic life. Laurel Richardson (1990 : 131) has pointed out, ‘narrativizing, like
Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. Moving through 11 international and comparative case studies, it explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed.
Affect has emerged as a major analytical lens of social research. However, it is rarely applied to universities and their marketisation. Offering a unique exploration of the contemporary role of affect in academic labour and the organisation of scholarship, this book considers modes of subjectivation, professional and personal relationships and organisational structures and their affective charges.
Chapter 9 is available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Over the course of the last ten years the issue of debt has become a serious problem that threatens to destroy the global socio-economic system and ruin the everyday lives of millions of people. This collection brings together a range of perspectives of key thinkers on debt to provide a sociological analysis focused upon the social, political, economic, and cultural meanings of indebtedness.
The contributors to the book consider both the lived experience of debt and the more abstract processes of financialisation taking place globally. Showing how debt functions on the level of both macro- and microeconomics, the book also provides a more holistic perspective, with accounts that span sociological, cultural, and economic forms of analysis.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, yet it causes damage to society in ways that can’t be fixed. Instead of helping to address our current crises, AI causes divisions that limit people’s life chances, and even suggests fascistic solutions to social problems. This book provides an analysis of AI’s deep learning technology and its political effects and traces the ways that it resonates with contemporary political and social currents, from global austerity to the rise of the far right.
Dan McQuillan calls for us to resist AI as we know it and restructure it by prioritising the common good over algorithmic optimisation. He sets out an anti-fascist approach to AI that replaces exclusions with caring, proposes people’s councils as a way to restructure AI through mutual aid and outlines new mechanisms that would adapt to changing times by supporting collective freedom.
Academically rigorous, yet accessible to a socially engaged readership, this unique book will be of interest to all who wish to challenge the social logic of AI by reasserting the importance of the common good.
Why do the UK and US disproportionately incarcerate the mentally ill, frequently poor people of color? Via multiple re-framings of the question–theological, socioeconomic, and psychological– Andrew Skotnicki diagnoses a “persecution of the prophetic” at the heart of the contemporary criminal justice system.
This interdisciplinary book draws on criminology, theology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and psychiatric history to consider the increasingly intractable issue of mass incarceration. Inviting a new, collaborative conversation on penal reform as a fundamentally “life-affirming” project, it defends the dignity of those diagnosed as mentally unstable and their capacity for spiritual transcendence.
Exploring the current and historical tensions between liberal capitalism and indigenous models of family life, Ian Kelvin Hyslop argues for a new model of child protection in Aotearoa New Zealand and other parts of the Anglophone world.
He puts forward the case that child safety can only be sustainably advanced by policy initiatives which promote social and economic equality and from practice which takes meaningful account of the complex relationship between economic circumstances and the lived realities of service users.
Ten percent of the world’s population lives on islands, but until now the place and space characteristics of islands in criminological theory have not been deeply considered. This book moves beyond the question of whether islands have more, or less, crime than other places, and instead addresses issues of how, and by whom, crime is defined in island settings, which crimes are policed and visible, and who is subject to regulation. These questions are informed by ‘the politics of place and belonging’ and the distinctive social networks and normative structures of island communities.
Pussy grabbing; hot mommas; topless protest; nasty women. Whether hypersexualised, desexualised, venerated or maligned, women’s bodies in public space continue to be framed as a problem. A problem that is discursively ‘solved’ by the continued proliferation of rape culture in everyday life.
Indeed, despite the rise in research and public awareness about rape culture and sexism in contemporary debates, gendered violence continues to be normalised.
Using case studies from the US and UK – the de/sexualised pregnancy, the troublesome naked protest, the errant BDSM player – Fanghanel interrogates how the female body is figured through, and revolts against, gendered violence.
Rape culture currently thrives. This book demonstrates how it happens, the politics that are mobilised to sustain it, and how we might act to contest it.
From fine art to popular digital culture, criminologists are increasingly engaged in the processes of the visual.
In this pioneering work, Bill McClanahan provides a concise and lively overview of the origins and contemporary role of visual criminology. Detailing and employing the most prominent approaches at work in visual criminology, this book explores the visual perspective in relation to prisons, police, the environment, and drugs, while noting the complex social and ethical implications embedded in visual research.
This original book broadens the horizons of criminological engagement and reveals how visual criminology offers new and critical ways to understand and theorize crime and harm.
This Byte offers readers insight into some of the central debates and questions about gender and the family, examined through the lens of moral panic. It begins with an overview of the part played by moral panics, together with an appraisal of the work of Stanley Cohen, one of the chief architects of moral panic ideas. Drawing on research and practice examples from different parts of the world, it explores interconnections between gender, class, ‘race’ and age, and interrogates the role of the state (and social work) in intervening in family life.
