This book seeks to better understand the meaning and implications of the UKs calamitous encounter with the COVID-19 global pandemic for the future of British neoliberalism. Construing COVID-19 as a political pandemic and mobilising a novel applied political philosophy approach, the authors cultivate fresh intellectual resources, both analytical and normative, to better understand why the UK failed the COVID-19 test and how it might 'fail forward' so as to strengthen its resilience. COVID-19 they argue, has intercepted the UK government's decades-long experimentation with neoliberalism at what appears to be a threshold moment in this model's life course. Neoliberalism has served as a key progenitor of the country's vulnerability: the pandemic has cruelly unveiled the failings of neoliberal logics and legacies which have placed the country at elevated risk and hampered its response. The pandemic in turn has attenuated underlying systemic maladies inherent in British neoliberalism and served as a great disruptor and potential accelerant of history; a consequential episode in the tumultuous life of this politico-economic model. To meaningfully 'build back better', a true renaissance of social democracy is needed. Drawing upon the neorepublican tradition of political philosophy, the authors confront neoliberalism's hegemonic but parochial concept of human freedom as non-interference and place the neorepublican idea of freedom as non-domination in the service of building a new UK social contract. This book will be of interest to political philosophers, political geographers, medical sociologists, public-health scholars, and epidemiologists, to stakeholders engaged in the public inquiry processes now gathering momentum globally and to architects of build back better programmes, especially in western advanced capitalist economies.

This book revisits the modern history of Poland, from the perspective of its social sciences. The book makes this case study a model for the application of Bourdieu's approach to the historical analysis of non-core Western societies. The book is, in other words, a reflexive study of the application of Bourdieu's social theory. At the same time, it also critically studies the application of Western social theory in Poland, which is largely seen as a peripheral country. The study of Polish social sciences, with particular emphasis on linguistics and literary studies, points to the peculiar dynamics of peripheral intellectual and academic fields and their external dependencies. These insights offer a critical extension of Bourdieu's theory of state and social elites beyond the Western core focusing on how the theories can be used in the reinterpretation and expansion of post-colonial theory, global history and comparative studies of post-communism. The book will be suitable for scholars and students of all those interested in the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, global historical sociology, societies in Central and Eastern , socio-linguistics, literary studies and political sociology.

This book examines 52 apologetic allocutions produced during federal sentencing hearings. The practice of inviting defendants to make a statement in their own behalf is a long-standing one and it is understood as offering defendants the opportunity to impress a judge or jury with their remorse, which could be a factor in the sentence that is imposed. Defendants raised the topics of the offense, mitigation, future behaviour and the sentence in different ways and this book explores the pros and cons associated with the different strategies that they used. Because there is no way of ascertaining exactly how effective (or ineffective) an individual allocution is, case law, sociolinguistic and historical resources, and judges' final remarks are used to develop hypotheses about defendants' communicative goals as well as what might constitute an ideal defendant stance from a judge's point of view. The corpus is unique because, unlike official transcripts, the transcripts used for this study include paralinguistic features such as hesitations, wavering voice, and crying-while-talking. Among its highlights, the book proposes that although a ritualized apology formula (e.g., "I'm sorry " or "I apologize ") would appear to be a good fit for the context of allocution and even appears to be expected, the use of these formulas carries implications in this context that do not serve defendants' communicative goals. I argue that the application of Austin's (1962) performative-constative continuum reveals that offense-related utterances that fall closer to the constative end are more consistent with the discursive constraints on the speech event of allocution. Further, I propose that the ideologies associated with allocution, in particular the belief that allocution functions as a protection for defendants, obscures the ways in which the context constrains what defendants can say and how effectively they can say it.

How can we understand power in a world of ever-growing complexity? This book proposes that we can do so by rethinking the theory and practice of political hegemony through the resources of complexity theory. Taking Gramsci's understanding of hegemony as its starting point, the book argues that the intricacies of contemporary power can be mapped by applying concepts drawn from complexity theory, such as emergence, self-organisation, metastability, and generative entrenchment. It develops an original account of social complexity, drawing upon critical realist sociology, analytic philosophy of science, Marxist and continental philosophies, and neoliberal and anarchist thought. It then draws out the elements of Gramscian hegemony that already align with complexity concepts, such as the balance of forces, common sense, and the historic bloc. On this basis, the book sets out the different dimensions of complex hegemonic power before using this theory to interpret the nature of the power of neoliberalism since 2008.

This book examines place and place-making in London's Borough Market. In particular, it uses topo/graphy ('place-writing) to interrogate the ways in which Borough Market's material, social-sensual and discursive relations assemble to reproduce Borough Market as a place, market and marketplace. Its central premise is that market-processes - the negotiation and exchange of commodities -are place-processes. This means that the often-abstract relationships that ultimately define what we think of as the economy are embedded in the rich and every materiality, sociality, sensuality and meanings associated with place. By tracing out these different elements, topo/graphy illustrates the ways in which economic reproduction is grounded in particular and often discrete practices. However, by assembling them together, this highlights the ways in which place and place-making are the driving force behind the economy at large.

This book explores the advantages of and challenges concerning Special Religious Education (SRE) in multicultural Australia and argues for the need for General Religious Education (GRE) as well. Through the lens of the most recent scholarship, and drawing on an in-depth qualitative study and specific case studies, the book examines the current debate on the role of religious education within government schools. It addresses key concepts of values education, spirituality, health and wellbeing, and cultural and religious identity. It analyses why it is important to retain SRE, together with GRE, as government policy. It explores highly relevant, controversial and contested issues regarding SRE, including the 30% of Australia's population who declare themselves as having "no religion", and brings fresh insights to the table. While secularization has increased in both the national and international spheres, there has also been an increase in fundamentalism within religious beliefs. Events such as the September 11 terror attacks and the more recent mass shootings by white supremacists and eco-fascists in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Pittsburgh and San Diego in the USA are reminders that religion is still a major actor in the twenty-first century. This poses new challenges for the relationship between church and state, and demonstrates the need to revisit the role of religious education within government schools. While the importance of GRE is generally acknowledged, SRE has increasingly come under attack by some researchers and teacher and parent bodies as being inappropriate and contradictory to the values of the postmodern world. On the other hand, the key stakeholders from all the faith traditions in Australia wish to retain the SRE classes in government schools. The book addresses this burning issue, and shows that it is relevant not only for Australia but also globally.

This book addresses the mystery and diversity of urbanization in China, especially with regard to urban villages. The "village in the city" is a unique social phenomenon in the process of Chinese urbanization. A local village society composed of deep-rooted social networks linked by blood, geography, folk beliefs, and folk customs is the outcome of a complex social process, which is accompanied by changes in property rights, restructuring of social networks, and conflicting benefits and values. The end of the village is the epitome of social transformation, and for China as a whole, this change may take a very long time to complete. This book includes various examples of and stories on urban villages, offering readers a wealth of insights into the phenomenon and its significance.

This book analyses multiple facets of Kracauer's work, comprehending the essayistic, narrative, philosophical, theoretical and critical writings, and putting special emphasis on some aspects: the phenomenology of metropolis, the theory of historiographic method, the reflections on the crisis of the subject and the emergence of a new subjectivity, the new forms of perception and aesthetic behaviour in late capitalism, the function of critic-intellectuals, the sociology of the middle classes, the theory of fascism, the aesthetical and sociological reflections on literary genres, the politicization of melancholy. An original feature of this book is the attention it pays to the links between Kracauer's theoretical and critical writings and the traditions of heterodox Marxism, against a habitual tendency to obliterate the political (and emancipatory) dimension in the German author.

This book will offer a full reconstruction of the history of Theoretical Marxism in Italy between 1895 and 1935, based on a rigorous philological method. The starting term (1895) is marked by the publication of Antonio Labriola's first essay on historical materialism (In memory of Communist Manifesto); the final term coincides with the conclusion of the "Prison Notebooks" written by Antonio Gramsci. This book analyses the original character of the Marxist philosophy in Italy, which emerged by distinguishing itself from the "orthodoxy" of the Second and Third International. By delineating a significant chapter in the history of Marxism, the book will also propose a specific contribution to the history of Italian Philosophy, which is here studied in relation to the developments of European philosophy, beyond the traditional subdivisions of Positivism, Idealism and Marxism.

This book explores why democratization processes in Sub-Saharan Africa have made so little progress despite more than two decades of multi-party politics on the subcontinent. By applying multiple linear regression analyses to a new data set on multi-party elections in Sub-Saharan Africa, the study investigates the relationship between political mobilizations and electoral competitiveness. It finds that the more societal groups engage in political mobilizations, such as protests and strikes, the more competitive elections become. Based on these results, the author argues for a change in the policies of international democracy assistance programs. The study's findings suggest that efforts to promote democracy would likely be more successful if international donors focused their support on organizations that have active constituencies and are willing to use their mobilization capacity to address ruling elites with political or socio-economic grievances.

Antonio Gramsci lived the Great War as a "historic break," a profound experience that left an indelible mark on the development of his political thought. Translated into English for the first time, Alternative Modernities reconstructs and analyses this critical period of Gramsci's intellectual formation through a systematic analysis of his writings from 1915 to 1935. For Gramsci, Soviet Communism, "Americanism," and the "new" Fascist State were the principle responses to the crisis of the old world order. He portrayed them as the three protagonists of twentieth-century modernity, alternatives destined to tragically clash in the worldwide struggle for hegemony. Among the arguments in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci casts doubt on the political strategy of Soviet Communism and the theoretical underpinnings of "official Marxism." Instead, he suggests a radical revision of Marxism by breathing life into a new interpretation whose fundamental concepts are: politics as the struggle for hegemony, the "passive revolution" as a historical paradigm of modernity, and the philosophy of praxis as the welding between visions of the worlds, historical analyses, and political strategies. Gramsci's intuitions culminate in a new theory of the political subject, supported by a reflection upon the 20th century that still speaks to us today, pointing the way toward a new narrative of world history.

Policing and ecological crises - and all the inequalities, discrimination, and violence they entail - are pressing contemporary problems. Ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change threaten local communities and ecosystems, and, cumulatively, the planet as a whole. Police brutality, wars, paramilitarism, private security operations, and securitization more widely impact people - especially people of colour - and habitats. This edited collection explores their relationship, and investigates the numerous ways in which police, security, and military forces intersect with, reinforce, and facilitate ecological and climate catastrophe. Employing a case study-based approach, the book examines the relationships and entanglements between policing and ecosystems, revealing the intimate connection between political violence and ecological degradation.

In this groundbreaking study, Ana Hernandez offers an in-depth analysis of the social and cultural influences in the Latino community and its effect on the development of Latino racial identity from clinical and therapeutic perspectives. Her book addresses what it means to be a "Latino" in the United States, including the origins of the term and its use to describe individuals from Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. It makes distinctions among race, ethnicity, and culture and describes common terminologies used to denote individuals whose origins lie in the south of the Western Hemisphere. An Evolving Racial Identity discusses mental health consequences that can result from varying racial identities and examines the sociocultural contexts that explain the prevalence of diverse racial identities and the racial experiences in the United States. The study employs a research lens from data collected on 206 self-identified Latino young adults to evaluate experiences of racial discrimination and parental racial socialization in addition to what happens when individuals from Central, South America, and the Caribbean are confronted with the harsh realities of race in the United States. Hernandez deftly describes the ways in which individuals cope with North American racial discourse while simultaneously grappling with their own countries' racial socialization and colonization histories, which are often unacknowledged and unaddressed in the U.S. mental health field. This sociocultural context has important implications for mental health. This book offers strategies for mental health practitioners from the perspective of couples and family therapists. It also offers a Racialized Identity Framework to guide researchers and clinicians on how to best understand and alleviate the phenomenon of racial identity within the Latino population.

Queer South Rising: Voices of a Contested Place is a collection of essays about the South by people who identify as both Southern and queer. The collection's name hints at the provocative nature of its contents: placing Queer and South side-by-side challenges readers to think about each word differently. The idea that a queer South might rise undermines the Battle Cry of ""The South's Gonna rise Again!"" embedded in the collective memory of a conservative South. This rising does not refer to a kind of Enlightenment transcendence where the region achieves some sort of distinctive prominence. It suggests instead ruptures, like furrows in a plowed field where seeds are sown. The rising Whitlock envisions is akin to breaking and turning over meanings of Southern place. The title further serves to remind readers of the complexities of the place as it calls into question notions of a universal, homogenous LGBT, queer, identity. Queer South Rising is the first truly interdisciplinary collection of essays on the South and queerness that deliberately aims for multiple approaches to the topics. This collection is intended for a wide audience of ""regular"" folks. Essays explore multiple intersections of Southern place-religion, politics, sexuality, race, education-that transcend regional boundaries. This book counters conventional scholarly texts; it invites all readers interested in the South and queer themes to engage with the narratives it holds-and perhaps question their assumptions. Whitlock has sought, in collecting these essays, to seek out a diverse group of authors-across disciplines, professions, and interests-to shatter perceptions about a nostalgic, romanticised Southern culture in general.

This book explores how discursive psychology (DP) research can be applied to disability and the everyday and institutional constructions of bodymind differences. Bringing together both theoretical and empirical work, it illustrates how DP might be leveraged to make visible nuanced understandings of disability and difference writ large. The authors argue that DP can attend to how such realities are made relevant, dealt with, and negotiated within social practices in the study of disability. They contend that DP can be used to unearth the nuanced and frequently taken for granted ways in which disability is made real in both everyday and institutional talk, and can highlight the very ways in which differences are embodied in social practices - specifically at the level of talk and text. This book demonstrates that rather than simply staying at the level of theory, DP scholars can make visible the actual means by which disabilities and differences more broadly are made real, resisted, contested, and negotiated in everyday social actions. This book aims to expand conceptions of disability and to deepen the - at present, primarily theoretical - critiques of medicalization.

This book reports on innovative interdisciplinary research in the field of cultural studies. The study spans the early twentieth to twenty-first centuries and fills a gap in our understanding of how girls' and women's religious identity is shaped by maternal and institutional relations. The unique research focuses on the stories of thirteen groups of Australian mothers and daughters, including the maternal genealogy of the editor of the book. Extended conversations conducted twenty years apart provide a situated approach to locating the everyday practices of women, while the oral storytelling presents a rich portrayal of how these girls and women view themselves and their relationship as mothers and daughters. The book introduces the key themes of education, work and life transitions as they intersect with generational change and continuity, gender and religion, and the non-linear transitional stories are told across the life-course examining how Catholic pasts shaped, and continue to shape, the participants' lives. Adopting a multi-methodological approach to research drawing on photographs, memorabilia passed among mothers and daughters, journal entries and letters, it describes how women's lives are lived in different spaces and negotiated through diverse material and symbolic dimensions.

Social network analysis provides a meaningful lens for advancing a more nuanced understanding of the communication networks and practices that bring together policy advocates and practitioners in their day-to-day efforts to broker evidence into policymaking processes. This book advances knowledge brokerage scholarship and methodology as applied to policymaking contexts, focusing on the ways in which knowledge and research are utilized, and go on to influence policy and practice decisions across domains, including communication, health and education. There is a growing recognition that knowledge brokers - key intermediaries - have an important role in calling attention to research evidence that can facilitate the successful implementation of evidence-informed policies and practices. The chapters in this volume focus explicitly on the history of knowledge brokerage research in these contexts and the frameworks and methodologies that bridge these disparate domains. The contributors to this volume offer useful typologies of knowledge brokerage and explicate the range of causal mechanisms that enable knowledge brokers' influence on policymaking. The work included in this volume responds to this emerging interest by comparing, assessing, and delineating social network approaches to knowledge brokerage across domains. The book is a useful resource for students and scholars of social network analysis and policymaking, including in health, communication, public policy and education policy.

This 25-volume set has titles originally published between 1951 and 1995. It explores several different aspects of the police and their approaches to policing over the years. Many of the titles are from the 1980s, where the police were beginning to come under increasing scrutiny and their relationship with the public was under pressure. Topics include: accountability, community policing, police work, policy, training, along with international comparisons. Ongoing debates of police accountability and police race relations today mean this collection is a timely resource for those interested in criminology, particularly the recent history of the police and their role in society.

The Psychosocial Imaginaries of Defence Nationalism interrogates the emergence of far-right nationalist 'defence leagues' in Australia and the UK. Throughout the book, Liam Gillespie refers to these groups as defence nationalists: that is, as nationalists who imagine themselves as defenders of the nation and therefore national subjects par excellence. Drawing on original research, psychoanalytic and psychosocial theory-and particularly the work of Jacques Lacan-the author explores the narratives, imaginaries and subjectivities that sustain these groups, as well as the narratives, imaginaries and subjectivities these groups sustain. He argues that unlike other nationalist groups, defence nationalists are not primarily concerned with realising their avowed political projects. Instead, they are concerned with constructing and then enjoying themselves as the nation's self-ordained defenders. This means that which threatens the nation can paradoxically have a fortifying effect upon defence nationalists, legitimising and securing both the way they see themselves, and the position they see themselves occupying with/in the nation. The Psychosocial Imaginaries of Defence Nationalism will be of interest to anyone concerned with critical theorisations of contemporary nationalism, as well as with the application of psychoanalytic and psychosocial theory to social, cultural and political analysis.

In the Anthropocene age there is a need for unifying the relationships between people, planet and technology, their interactions, experiences and impacts across ecosystems. In response to this need, this book introduces unifying bridging concepts informational waves and transdisciplinary resonance towards producing shared understanding. This book also presents emerging methods for transdisciplinary projects focusing on moments, paradoxes and dialogues for digital social innovation and sustainable development partnership goals for improving quality of life. Shared understanding is about how people from different fields and perspectives are communicating, curating, embodying, intuiting and reflecting on shared responsibilities within social ecologies. As a guide to co-designing for information experiences that create meaningful moments of shared understanding, the author illuminates essential transferable, lateral mindsets and soft skills: knowing the gaps through imagination, creativity, listening and noticing, and bridging the gaps through problem emergence, multiple stakeholders, informed learning and personal change.