Les Back remembers that in the early hours of Sunday 18 January, 1981, a devastating fire engulfed party-goers at a birthday celebration being held at 439 New Cross Road for Yvonne Ruddock and Angela Jackson. Continue reading New Crass Massahkah: Remembering the fire at 439 New Cross Road
Bev Skeggs writes in The Sociological Review; “I didn’t think that my experience of NHS privatisation could get any worse than last year …” Continue reading A Crisis in Humanity: What Everyone with Parents Is Likely to Face in the Future
In this piece in Red Pepper, Yasmin Gunaratnam reflects on John Berger’s gut solidarity with the stranger. Continue reading Borderless ambitions: a reflection on John Berger
Based on empirical research with participants from working-class backgrounds studying and working in higher education in England, this article by Vik Loveday examines the lived experience of shame. Building on a feminist Bourdieusian approach to social class analysis, the article contends that ‘struggles for value’ within the field of higher education precipitate classed judgements, which … Continue reading Embodying Deficiency Through ‘Affective Practice’: Shame, Relationality, and the Lived Experience of Social Class and Gender in Higher Education
Writing in The Conversation, Vikki Bell and Yasmin Gunaratnam discuss how Berger, who died on January 2 at the age of 90, had a profound influence on the popular understanding of art and the visual image. Also that he was also a vibrant example of the public intellectual, using his position to speak out against social injustices and … Continue reading How John Berger changed our way of seeing art
Dr Abby Day, Reader of Race, Faith & Culture in the Department of Sociology, writes in The Conversation that ‘Poor, uneducated, housebound women appear to be almost wholly responsible for the lack of integration of some Muslim communities in Britain. At least, that seems to be the finding of a new report on social cohesion, carried out by Dame Louise … Continue reading Another century, another witch-hunt: this time it’s poor Muslim women
Alberto Toscano’s translation of Franco Fortini’s A Test of Powers: Writings on Criticism and Literary Institutions, a classic work of Italian Marxist literary criticism, is now out from Seagull’s Italian List. The book includes ‘The Labour of Division’, a long translator’s introduction, laying out the political and intellectual stakes of Fortini’s work. Originally published in Italian in 1965, A Test … Continue reading A Test of Powers
A new publication from Dr Pam Odih. Adsensory technology presupposes a neoliberal entrepreneurial self as an integral feature of its biopolitical financialisation of healthcare regimes. According to Michel Foucault, neoliberalism is indebted to the endeavour of its self-disciplined subjects, investing human capital in a self-regulated, entrepreneurial pursuit of responsible healthcare and well-being. Primarily informed by … Continue reading Adsensory Financialisation
This paper reflects on the challenges and pitfalls of doing collaborative ethnography in a research project (ARITHMUS) that studies the enactment of populations through statistics. Successful collaboration is essential in order to translate the idea of a transnational field of statistical practices – the conceptual starting point through which the researchers of the ARITHMUS team … Continue reading TRANSCENDING METHODOLOGICAL NATIONALISM THROUGH A TRANSVERSAL METHOD? ON THE STAKES AND CHALLENGES OF COLLABORATION
‘Second Class Bath’ The social life of water and washing provides a way to understand the history of cities. In Liverpool in the midst of a cholera epidemic in 1832, Kitty Wilk… Source: An Urban Sociology of Water by Les Back Continue reading An Urban Sociology of Water by Les Back
