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Developing a trilayer analysis of global, national and individual perspectives, this book examines ageing and the health and social care crisis. It begins with an examination of how broad structural and discursive trends, such as neoliberalism and globalisation, have influenced the financing and provision of health and social care for older people in Western countries including Germany, Sweden and the UK. It then goes onto discuss the impact that privatisation, ‘choice’ and competition has had on service provision, including how declining social protections have impacted upon employment practices. Three UK case studies (active ageing, pre-emergency, and end of life care) provide insight into individual’s (both older people and health care workers) experiences of navigating the risky, fragmented and complex health and social care system. Then the UK’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is compared with Sweden and Germany’s, and the UK government’s intended solutions to the health and social care crisis is discussed. Finally, the book ends by showcasing examples of innovative care solutions that have been trialled in the UK, and what broader cultural and political changes are necessary to provide a more sustainable and dignified health and social care system for older people.

This book explores Chinese young men’s views of manhood and how they construct and negotiate masculinities in everyday lives. Drawing from empirical research, it uses the term shenti (body-self) as a central concept to investigate the Chinese male body and explores masculinity within intimacy and kinship. The book proposes and develops a new concept of ‘elastic masculinity’ which can be stretched and forged differently depending on the context. At the same time, the men’s masculinity formation is constrained by the availability of resources, structural constraints, cultural traditions and diverse personal relationships. The book showcases how Chinese masculinities reflect the resilience of Confucian notions as well as transnational ideas of modern manhood. By doing so, it prioritizes local knowledge while setting the scene in a global framework. The book provides a unique dialogue with ‘western’ discourse on masculinity, and a timely study of how ordinary men actively engage with China’s global modernity, increasing individualisation, shifting gender values and changing local realities.

The premise of the book is that building and construction practices are insensitive to the needs of many people, and implicated in the widespread despoliation and degradation of ecological systems and the environment. From the construction of transport networks and major commercial and residential property in rapidly urbanising countries, to the popularisation of self-build and home improvements, we are living in a period of incessant and unprecedented building. Few places are untouched by construction and infrastructure projects that are part of an ideology of building that has little regard to what is needed and, instead, are shaped by political and economic values that regard building and construction as ‘a good thing’. Using examples from around the world, the book identifies the mentalities of construction and building that are failing people and places in many different ways, and calls for radical changes to city living and environments by building less, but better.

Over the last twenty years, a resurgence of craft food industries occurred across the U.S. Drawing on consumers’ desire for slow/local food craft breweries, traditional butchers, cheesemongers, and bakeries have been popping up in across the United States. These industries are typically found in major urban areas, staffed by middle class, college educated, often white men and sometimes women who view working in these industries as part of an alternative lifestyle existing in opposition to the mainstream emphasis of industrial consumption. Yet this emphasis on urban craft industries obscures the complex reality behind the craft food movement and the diverse communities that have supported craft and artisanal foods for centuries. Across the Southern U.S. these slow and local foods are a traditional part of daily life, and their continued practice sits at the intersection of financial sustenance, knowledge, and art. Exploring a variety of Southern artisanal foods from Virginia wineries to shrimping in coastal communities and Mississippi tamales, the producers of these foods show how traditional, not necessarily “new” these movements are within the region and the U.S. as a whole. Arguably, it is the diversity of who is central to these products and foodways that render it and the related history invisible to most U.S. consumers.

Criminal Justice is popularly conceptualised as a pursuit of the truth. This book considers the extent to which this view reflects reality by exploring a number of key themes. The ‘pursuit of truth’ suggests an obtainable, single truth and the book considers the extent to which truth is a far more complex, nuanced phenomenon. Often the criminal process appears to be more about constructing a narrative and telling a convincing story. The book explores the extent to which a pursuit of truth can conflict with other values such as justice and the protection of human rights, with particular focus on illegally obtained evidence and confessions. The concluding chapters discuss the extent to which the pursuit of truth has shaped the modern trial process and assesses alternative approaches to criminal justice including restorative justice and truth commissions. The conclusion highlights some fundamental themes in the book and points to the limitations of the current criminal justice system not only in terms of establishing truth but in terms of realising significant social benefit. Three areas of focus are taken to assess the current system’s ability to find the truth: blame, juvenile justice, and the pursuit of justice. The book argues that the current criminal process adopts a person, rather than a system, approach to bad events with a focus on identifying individuals to blame rather than addressing the wider problems resulting from crime.

Focusing on the Criminalisation of Social Policy, this book explores the intersections between crime and social policy and the ways in which contemporary social policies in many different countries look more like crime control policies. From anti-immigration agendas, which criminalise vulnerable populations, to the punishment of the poor and the governance of parenting, the book engages with the ways in which certain constituencies in our societies, who need help and support, are made to feel criminal in their relationships with the state and its agents. Specific policy examples chosen from across countries show that the criminalisation of social policy has resonance internationally. These are selected from the fields of work and welfare; borders and citizenship; family policy, urban planning and offender reintegration. In illuminating intersecting, and at times very troubling policy interventions, the book wrestles with ideas as to what social policy and welfare states should look like in our societies. It incites the reader to continue this process so that we reclaim the best of the ‘social’ in social policy for the twenty-first century.

There is increasing pressure on the humanities to justify their value and on criminology to undertake interdisciplinary research. In this book, the author establishes a new interdisciplinary methodology, ‘criminological criticism’, harnessing the synergy between literary studies and critical criminology to produce genuine interventions in social reality. The author practices criminological criticism on George Miller' Mad Max: Fury Road, Prime Video's Carnival Row, and J.K. Rowling's The Cuckoo's Calling, demonstrating how these popular allegories provide insights into the harms of sexism, racism, and class prejudice. The book proposes a model for collaboration between literary studies and critical criminology that is beneficial to the humanities, the social sciences, and society.

Drawing on original research from the Women, Family, Crime and Justice research network, this book sheds new light on the challenges and experiences of women and families who encounter the criminal justice system in the UK. Each chapter demonstrates how these groups are often ignored, oppressed and repeatedly victimised. The book addresses crucial issues including short-term imprisonment, trauma-specific interventions, schools supporting children affected by parental imprisonment and visibility and voice in research. Bringing together contemporary knowledge from both research and practice, the book offers valuable insights and practical recommendations for positive action and change.

This multi-disciplinary volume brings together international scholarship from across cultural studies, humanities and social sciences. It involves critical review of a comparatively neglected issue – the desexualization of older people – that itself forms part of an emerging field of knowledge that relates to older people’s sexuality and intimacy. Funnelling down from more general to more particular experiences (often related to identity difference), the volume explores the various ways that older people encounter constraints on their sexual and intimate self-expression. Indeed, risk and surveillance can be seen as structuring conditions of ageing sexualities and the issues addressed concern difficulties in relation to consent, relating and relatives erotic aesthetics, gendered ageing sexuality (menopause), disabilities, dementia, care homes and their residents, sex and older lesbian, gay bisexual, trans and intersex people, and care services and ageing sexuality. As well as providing an overview of broader themes to which chapter point, the final chapter also outlines a research agenda that itself points towards creative forms of resexualization of diverse older selves. Although the volume’s focus is on desexualization, resexualization is to some extent acknowledged in each chapter.

The book explores how older people experience physical or sensory disability, taking a critical approach to gerontology. It also draws on critical disability studies, aspects of medical sociology and lifecourse studies. The book is informed by an empirical study with two groups rarely considered together in empirical or theoretical work – people first experiencing disability with ageing and people ageing with long-standing disability. Despite the fact that older people experiencing impairment are rarely considered ‘disabled’, the book shows that study participants could feel disabled by a range of factors including inaccessible environments and disablist interactions with others, as is the experience of disabled people generally. Often experienced in combination with losses of intimates, this can represent a challenge to a sense of value and meaning in life. Older people can also respond dynamically, engaging in challenging processes of interpretation and reinterpretation that are underappreciated in dominant understandings of later life lived with disability as a residual category encompassed in concepts such as ‘fourth age’. The book argues that the extent to which constructions of ageing and of disability, and the social devaluation of each, are intertwined and linked to fears of human vulnerability means that these issues would benefit from approaches that address them across the life span. It points to areas of scholarship offering potential for conversations across the fields of ageing and disability, arguing for an engagement with disability in older age as a personal, embodied, social, cultural, political and socio-economic phenomenon.

Erich Fromm’s contribution to public sociology around the world has largely been forgotten as Burawoy highlighted C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, WEB Du Bois and Jane Adams as canonical figures. This book puts the story of Fromm’s sociological training with Alfred Weber, key role in the critical sociology of the early Frankfurt School, influence on C. Wright Mills, David Riesman and early sociological Marxism back on our historical awareness. The book outlines Fromm’s major contributions to sociological theory and public sociology, theorizes how his optimal marginality created his activist and public intellectual career, tells the story of how he became a forgotten public sociologist, narrates his activism in the 1960s and evaluates how his public role improved but also created limitations to his work. We also offer a reformulation of his psychosocial ideas first outlined in Escape from Freedom (1941) but updated in the context of a global Fromm revival to help us understand global Trumpism, the current crisis of democracy and rise of authoritarianism and narcissism of both the right and the left.

From corporate corruption and the facilitation of money laundering, to food fraud and labour exploitation, European citizens continue to be confronted by serious corporate and white-collar crimes. Presenting an original series of provocative essays, this book offers a European framing of white-collar crime. Experts from different countries foreground what is unique, innovative, or different about white-collar and corporate crimes that are so strongly connected to Europe, including the tensions that exist within and between the nation-states of Europe, and within the institutions of the European region. This European voice provides an original contribution to discourses surrounding a form of crime which is underrepresented in current criminological literature.

This monograph reports on pioneering research from the ‘Men, Poverty and Lifetimes of Care’ (Leverhulme Trust, 2014-2018) study. It addresses questions concerning the routine care responsibilities of men in low-income localities and the resources and constraints that affect how they ‘do’ family and care on an everyday basis. Drawing on a mix of ethnographic, photographic and interview data generated with twenty-six men in different generational positions living in a Northern city in England, the relational dynamics of low-income family life are examined. The central thesis is that while policy and lay discussions of low-income men emphasise men’s absence, limited empirical focus on the household and on the role of ‘father’ as a generational identity, serves to obscure the variety of ways in which men in low-income families participate in family life in significant ways, at different times. Advancing the concept of family participation, the book reveals the contexts of significant hardship through which men in different generational positions engage in a range of caring practices. At the same time, austerity has entrenched conditions antithetical to these men’s efforts on behalf of their children and grandchildren. The analyses therefore reveal circumstances when men might be more resourced and capable of taking on care responsibilities, but also where state support may be lacking yet much needed. In a context of social ambivalence about men as carers, men with caring responsibilities remain highly isolated and welfare and market provision for ‘caring masculinities’ is neither being produced nor sustained.

Forgotten Wives examines the ways in which the institution and status of marriage has contributed to the active ‘disremembering’ of women’s achievements. Drawing on archives, biographies, autobiographies and historical accounts, the book interrogates conventions of history and biography writing to show how assumptions about marriage and women help to write women out of history. The book uses the case-studies of four women who were active in social and educational reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and were married to well-known men: Charlotte Shaw (née Payne-Townshend), Mary Booth (née Macaulay), Jeannette Tawney (née Beveridge) and Janet Beveridge (known previously as Jessy Mair). The case-studies demonstrate how independently-performing women disappear as supporters of their husbands’ work, as secretaries and research assistants, and as managers of men’s domestic lives. Even intellectual collaboration tends to be portrayed as normative wifely behaviour rather than as joint work. Forgotten Wives asks critical questions about the mechanisms that maintain gender inequality, and it contributes a fresh vision of how the welfare state developed in the early twentieth century.

The people most impacted by criminal justice polices, and practices, are seldom included in the decision making processes that impact their lives. This edited volume builds on the sentiment underpinning the growing ‘nothing about us without us’ social movement, to argue for the importance of an approach to criminology that is inclusive of those voices that have historically been hushed, marginalised, silenced or ignored. Incorporating the experiences of service users, academics, and state and grassroots practitioners, this volume presents a nuanced perspective that furthers criminological scholarship by capturing the voices of marginalised groups. The volume explores the importance of diversity and inclusivity in criminological discourses and, consider how researchers might bridge the gap between theory and lived experience, and how the authenticity of the voices of those who have been silenced can be incorporated into a meaningful criminology.

Bringing together new, multidisciplinary research, this edited collection explores how children and young people across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas experience and cope with diverse situations of poverty and precarity. It looks at the multiple impacts of neoliberalism, austerity and global economic crisis, evidencing the multiple harms and inequalities caused. It also examines the different ways that children, young people and families ‘get by’ under these challenging circumstances, showing how they care for one another and envisage more hopeful socio-political futures. The book has three thematic sections, exploring the transformative and uneven impacts of neoliberalism, austerity and economic crises for contemporary childhood and youth, intersecting inequalities, and children and young people’s negotiations of these profoundly challenging contexts.

This book is a one-off history of the women’s domestic violence movement in the UK with some international and global content. It celebrates transformative women’s activism on violence against women from the 1960s on. Interviews with activists, practitioners and abuse survivors provide reflection on this inspiring movement of social change for women, shaped by a generation of pioneering activists. The book is illustrated with memories, anecdotes and memoir, and with poems celebrating women’s activism. It also reflects on the movement challenging rape and sexual violence. It presents an analysis of the radical early politics of the domestic violence refuges and Women’s Aid in terms of the empowerment of women, collective working and attempting to break down differences between women providing and using services. This particular history is almost lost from view and the book aims to recall and celebrate it. Further, it details the challenges of the Black women’s movement and the development of specialist services for Black, minority ethnic and refugee (BMER) women. Legal, strategy and policy developments are outlined. Also covered are cutbacks, the difficulties of seeking funding within competitive commissioning frameworks and attacks on the sector in recent years, disproportionately experienced by BMER projects. The discussions include attention to harmful practices like ‘honour’-based violence, FGM and forced marriage. The book also discusses international activism on domestic violence, the relevance of shelters/refuges across the world and trans-national women’s partnerships. It outlines the development of feminist research on violence against women. Projects, campaigns and key activists are honoured throughout.

The figure of the imposter stirs a captivating combination of emotions, from intrigue to suspicion and horror. But what insights can these troublesome figures provide into the social relations and cultural forms from which they emerge? Beginning with a critical overview of previous uses of the imposter in social sciences and humanities, this volume explores this question through a diverse range of empirical cases, including click farms, magicians, spirit possession, images of celebrity, fake art and defrauding scientists. Proposing 'Thinking with Imposters' as an important new tool of analysis in the social sciences and humanities, this revolutionary book shows how the figure of the imposter can help upend social theory. First and foremost, the aim of this book is to upset traditional modes of analysis in the social sciences and humanities. In addition, in taking a closer look at how ‘imposters’ in various settings are named, shamed and defined, the chapters each speak to, and engage with, broader concerns – migration politics, state power and racism, to name but a few – challenging the status quo on how we think about these issues.

As nations reel from the effects of poverty, inequality, climate change and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels as though the world has entered a period characterized by pessimism, cynicism and anxiety. This edited collection challenges individualized understandings of emotion, revealing how they relate to cultural, economic and political realities in difficult times. Combining numerous empirical studies and theoretical developments from around the world, the diverse contributors explore how dystopian visions of the future influence, and are influenced by, the emotions of an anxious and precarious present. This is an original investigation into the changing landscape of emotion in dark and uncertain times.

Feeding Britain while preparing for the ravages of climate change are two key issues — yet there's no strategy for managing and enhancing that most precious resource: our land. This book explores how the pressures of leaving the EU, recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, and addressing global heating present unparalleled opportunities to re-work the countryside for the benefit of all. Incorporating personal, inspiring stories of people and places, the book sets out the innovative measures needed for nature's recovery while protecting our most valuable farmland, encouraging local food production and repeopling remote areas. In the first book to tackle these issues holistically, the author argues that we need to reshape the countryside with an adventurous new agenda at the heart of government.