6 ‘Second-class citizens’: reordering privilege and prejudice Castells (2012: 14) argues that anxiety is a response to an external threat over which the threatened person has no control. Anxiety leads to fear, and has a paralysing effect on action. However, anxiety can be overcome and lead to action if it develops into anger, usually through the perception of an unjust action and the identification of the agent responsible for it. In the previous chapter, the anxieties held by EDL supporters about Islam, and about Muslims, were detailed. It was shown how these
2 Martin Joormann Social class, economic capital and the Swedish, German and Danish asylum systems This chapter starts by problematizing the politico-legal distinction between ‘economic migrant’ and ‘refugee’ in the Swedish and wider European contexts. It goes on to discuss the procedural similarities and differences of the Swedish, German and Danish asylum systems, their different appeal instances and their implications regarding the question of who can be granted (refugee) protection status. Drawing on insights from my PhD thesis (Joormann, 2019) and
The appearance of corpses in rubbish tips is not a recent phenomenon. In Argentina, tips have served not only as sites for the disposal of bodies but also as murder scenes. Many of these other bodies found in such places belong to individuals who have suffered violent deaths, which go on to become public issues, or else are ‘politicised deaths’. Focusing on two cases that have received differing degrees of social, political and media attention – Diego Duarte, a 15-year-old boy from a poor background who went waste-picking on an open dump and never came back, and Ángeles Rawson, a girl of 16 murdered in the middle-class neighbourhood of Colegiales, whose body was found in the same tip – this article deals with the social meanings of bodies that appear in landfills. In each case, there followed a series of events that placed a certain construction on the death – and, more importantly, the life – of the victim. Corpses, once recognised, become people, and through this process they are given new life. It is my contention that bodies in rubbish tips express – and configure – not only the limits of the social but also, in some cases, the limits of the human itself.
All in the mix: class, race and school choice considers how parents choose secondary schools for their children and makes an important intervention into debates on school choice and education. The book examines how parents talk about race, religion and class – in the process of choosing. It also explores how parents’ own racialised and classed positions, as well as their experience of education, can shape the way they approach choosing schools. Based on in-depth interviews with parents from different classed and racialised backgrounds in three areas in and around Manchester, the book shows how discussions about school choice are shaped by the places in which the choices are made. It argues that careful consideration of choosing schools opens up a moment to explore the ways in which people imagine themselves, their children and others in social, relational space.
Sexual images and innuendo have become commonplace in contemporary advertising; they often fail to register in any meaningful way with the audience. This book examines the essentially racist stereotypes through which Irish people have conventionally been regarded have been increasingly challenged and even displaced perhaps by a sequence of rather more complimentary perspectives. The various developments that are signified within the figure of the Celtic Tiger might be considered to have radically altered the field of political possibility in Ireland. The enormous cuts in public expenditure that marked this period are held to have established a desirable, stable macroeconomic environment. The Celtic Tiger shows that one can use the rhetoric about 'social solidarity' while actually implementing policies which increase class polarisation. The book discusses the current hegemonic construction of Ireland as an open, cosmopolitan, multicultural, tourist-friendly society. The two central pieces of legislation which currently shape Irish immigration policy are the 1996 Refugee Act and the Immigration Bill of 1999. The book offers a critical examination of the realities of the Celtic Tiger for Irish women. Processes of nation state formation invariably invoke homogeneous narratives of ethnicity and national identity. To invoke a collective subject of contemporary Ireland rhetorically is to make such a strategic utopian political assumption. For the last few hundred years, the Gaeltacht has exemplified the crisis of Irish modernity. Culture becomes capital, and vice versa, while political action increasingly consists of the struggle to maintain democratic autonomy in the face of global market forces.
choices and how they are choosing the social setting of their children’s education as much as the pedagogical approach or resources offered by the schools such as teachers, buildings and extra-curricular activities. Thus, the book examines how parents talk about social categories – particularly of race, religion and class – in this process of choosing. It also considers how their talk is emplaced – coming out of engagement in particular spatial relationships in local areas and schools. This involves an understanding of how places are perceived as racialised and classed
4 Schooling fears Introduction The previous chapter discussed how some parents found the process of choosing schools very stressful. These stresses were expressed by parents from a variety of backgrounds – in terms of both class and ethnicity – and in all areas of the study. Parents in part put this stress down to the frustration at the experience of being given the responsibility to make a choice yet finding that there were only one or two schools to choose between. At the same time, many parents had exercised a choice in terms of where they chose to live
, the relations between the state (in its form of local or central government) and schools and parents have been transformed towards the construction of parents (and occasionally young people) as consumers of educational options for their children. This marks a shift in education discourses away from concerns around inequalities, exclusion or general social welfare towards the ‘parentocracy’ made up of individual consumers (Reay et al. 2011). This is significant not just for its impact on classed or ethnic inequalities, it also has significant implications in terms of
this radical shift in labour market dynamics has received little more than a passing comment in the growing literature on Ireland’s recent apparent economic success.1 Furthermore, feminist analysis frequently attempts to create a seamless connection between women regardless of their class position. All too often there is an assumption, albeit frequently an unconscious one, that ‘we are all in this together’. This perspective ignores, of course, the fact that class position mediates one’s experience of oppression. 95 eih ch-5.P65 95 26/3/03, 15:12 96 Kennedy The
behaviour is shared within social groups. One of the central propositions of the ‘postmodernist’ approach to understanding consumption is that the importance of socio-structural context has decreased over time; we now live in a time where traditional forms of social stratification (for instance, along class, gender or racial lines) are less important than the individual’s ability to calculate individual actions rationally and where new forms of social structure create ‘new’ post-traditional social groups with quite different attitudes and orientations. Hence there is a