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This book examines absolute poverty in Europe, which is at the moment fairly neglected in academic and policy discourse. It opens with conceptual and methodological considerations that prepare the ground for an application of the concept of absolute poverty in the context of affluent societies and analyses shortcomings of social statistics as well as possibilities to include highly vulnerable groups. This includes thoughts on ethics of research in this particular field where people live under severe circumstances and research can make a difference. The book sheds light on crucial dimensions of deprivation and social exclusion of people in absolute poverty in affluent societies: access to health care, housing and nutrition, poverty related shame and violence. After conceptual and practical issues, the book investigates into different policy responses to absolute poverty in affluent societies from social policy concerns to civic organizations, e. g. food donations, and penalisation and “social cleansing” of highly visible poor. The book finally frames this discussion by profound ethical considerations and normative reasoning about absolute poverty and its alleviation, how it is related to concerns of justice/injustice as well as human dignity. Furthermore, it questions the power and importance of human rights and their judicial protection in regard of persons in absolute poverty.

In 2015, one hundred years passed since Robert Park penned his seminal article “The City: Suggestions for the investigation of human behaviour in the city environment” in the American Journal of Sociology. It provided an agenda for the Chicago school of urban sociology, which came to shape urban research for decades to come. Since 1915 much has changed, both in the urban world itself and in the urban research that reflects on those transformations. In today’s world of global cities, cities around the world have undergone dramatic development, and nowhere as dramatic as in China. In the world of urban research, Park’s human ecology approach has lost the appeal that it once had. Against this background, in this book specialists on urban China reflect on the relevance of Park’s article on “The City” – for cities in China, for urban research, and for questions about studying the social life of the city. The aim of the book is to take Park’s article as a point of departure for critical reflection on both the research on urban China and on the issues that Chinese cities face. The book offers readers a timely respite from the eruption of urban China research, to reflect on what the city in China contributes to urban studies more generally. Despite the shared starting point, the contributors represent a range of perspectives that would disrupt any notion of monolithic “Chinese school” while also pointing the way towards recurrent challenges, topics and approaches relevant for a contemporary urbanism.

With the academic study of ‘war’ gaining renewed popularity within criminology in recent years, this book illustrates the long-standing engagement with this social phenomenon within the discipline. Foregrounding established criminological work addressing war and connecting it to a wide range of extant sociological literature, the authors present and further develop theoretical and conceptual ways of thinking critically about war. Within this book, whilst providing an implicit critique of mainstream criminology the authors seek to question if a ‘criminology of war’ is possible, and if so how this seemingly ‘new horizon’ of the discipline might be usefully informed by sociology.

John Clarke is in conversation with 12 leading scholars about the dynamics of thinking critically in the social sciences. The conversations range across many fields and explore the problems and possibilities of doing critical intellectual work in ways that are responsive to changing conditions.By emphasising the many voices in play, in conversation with as well as against others, Clarke challenges the individualising myth of the heroic intellectual. He underlines the value of thinking critically, collaboratively and dialogically.The book also provides access to a sound archive of the original conversations.

This book explores the policy and social frames through which citizens and wider communities are being engaged with culture as a tool to mitigate the effects of social exclusion and deprivation. The study is based on an inter-disciplinary four-year research project investigating those individuals and organisations whose mission is to use culture, instrumentally, to help deprived communities in a variety of different ways. The project sought to examine the different scales of activity involved within cultural intermediation, examining national policy and practice, but grounded within specific community-level case studies. Although a number of sites across England were examined, two field sites in particular were the subject for a deep ethnographic engagement, including active interventions. These were Birmingham, with a focus on the Balsall Heath neighbourhood and Greater Manchester, with detailed work being undertaken in the Ordsall ward of Salford. These case studies feature throughout much of the book as a lens through which to see the impacts of wider policy trends. Research was undertaken during a period of quite dramatic change in policy and governance within the UK’s cultural sector. These changes were driven by one of the biggest experiments in refiguring the role of the public sector within the UK since 1945, as post-credit crunch governments have responded to the challenges of a struggling global economy by employing the discourse of ‘austerity’. As this book shows, what has emerged is a cultural intermediation sector that has refined its practices, adopting new funding models and arenas of activity.

This book’s starting point is the notion of theorising and the fact that, because scholarship at the intersection of ethnicity, race and old age has stagnated, we are in dire need of inquiries that focus on the context of discovery. The author argues that our scholarly imagination about this intersection needs to be developed now that the globalisation of international migration and transnationalism have increased the ethno-cultural diversity of our ageing populations. Through a scoping review of the last twenty years of research and theunderstandings of ethnicity and race that informs it, the author shows that scholarship on ageing and old age do not resonate well with the latest advancements in ethnicity and race scholarship. The book introduces gerontologists to social scientific discussions about ethnicity and race, introduces international migration scholars to the implications that population ageing has for the life-course, gives both of these scholarly fields insight into what characterizes scholarship at the intersection of ethnicity/ race and old age, andproposes a new research agenda. By bringing attention to the topics that have received the most attention (i.e. health inequalities, health and social care, intergenerational relationships and caregiving), and the manner in which ethnicity/ race have been made sense of so far, the author identifies the obstacles that scholarship on ethnicity, race and old age faces, and proposes how we can address them in an ethnicity-astute and diversity-informed manner.

Gender is a factor of youth migration; it shapes the roles, capacities, access to resources, and cultural expectations in society. Gender defines who leaves and who stays behind in the place of origin, or the extent from which the youth travels outside of their own communities. This collection is possibly the first to present the intersection of gender and youth migration with encompassing themes related to imperial histories, negotiating identities, education, and work using diverse studies in Canada, France, Hungary, Bangladesh, Turkey, Italy, Albania, Ethiopia, U.K. and the U.S. Gendered modalities suggest that there are particular ways or modes in which gender as a system of power relations become manifest in youth migration, either voluntarily or coerced, and consequently, their negotiation of structures and limiting social practices.Gender and youth are intrinsically connected to migration, and this book is about these connections in multidisciplinary perspectives in an increasingly globalized world.

This distinctive and engaging book proposes an imaginative criminology, focusing on how spaces of transgression are lived, portrayed and imagined. These include spaces of control or confinement, including prison and borders, and spaces of resistance. Examples range from camps where asylum seekers and migrants are confined to the exploration of deviant identities and the imagined spaces of surveillance and control in young adult fiction. Drawing on oral history, fictive portrayals, walking methodologies, and ethnographic and arts-based research, the book pays attention to issues of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, mobility and nationality as they intersect with lived and imagined space.

This book provides a transnational perspective on intellectual disability in the twentieth century with contributions from distinguished authors in 14 countries across 5 continents. Each chapter outlines policies and practice from the featured nation. Life stories illustrate their impact on people with intellectual disabilities and their families. The book brings together accounts of how intellectual disability was viewed, managed and experienced in countries across the globe. It examines the origins and nature of contemporary attitudes, policy and practice; and sheds light on the challenges of implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCPRD).

This book argues that mental health social work needs to be located within the wider political and social policy landscape. Wider societal attitudes to mental illness are examined followed by a discussion of the development of community care. The author argues that these historical perspectives provide an insight into the roots of the current crisis in mental health services. The book goes on to analyse a range of contemporary issues and challenges in mental health social work. It argues that social inequality and policies of austerity have increased levels of mental distress. It calls for a rediscovery of core social work values and a rejection of bureaucratic managerialism.

This volume brings together contributors from 18 countries to provide international perspectives on the politics of parental leave policies in different parts of the world. Initially looking in depth at the politics of care leave policies across Europe, the US, Latin America and Asia, the book moves on to consider a variety of key issues in depth, including gender equality, flexibility and challenges for fathers in using leave. In the final section of the book, contributors look beyond the early parenthood period to consider possible future directions for care leave policy in order to address the wider changes and challenges that our societies face.

The relationship between science and belief has been a prominent subject of public debate for many years, one that has relevance to everything from science communication, health and education to immigration and national values. Yet, sociological analysis of these subjects remains surprisingly scarce. This wide-ranging book critically reviews the ways in which religious and nonreligious belief systems interact with scientific theories and practices. Contributors explore how, for some secularists, ‘science’ forms an important part of social identity. Others examine how many contemporary religious movements justify their beliefs by making a claim upon science. Moving beyond the traditional focus on the United States, the book shows how debates about science and belief are firmly embedded in political conflict, class, community and culture.

Bringing together international case studies, this book offers theoretical and empirical insights into the interaction between social work and social policy. Moving beyond existing studies on policy practice, the book employs the policy cycle as a core analytical frame and focuses on the influence of social work(ers) in the problem definition, agenda setting, policy formulation and implementation of social policy. Twenty-three contributors offer examples of policy making from seven different countries and demonstrate how social work practitioners can become political actors, while also encouraging policy makers to become aware of the potential of social work for the social policy-making process.

In recent years, and particularly since the global economic crash, the issue of debt has moved centre stage in social, political, and economic thought. Although processes of financialisation have meant that extreme indebtedness has been a latent global problem since the 1980s, it was only in the wake of the crash that debt became a manifest systemic issue. This was because it was no longer possible to endlessly defer repayment into the future on the basis of a fantasy of ceaseless growth because it suddenly became clear that the financial system was not good for the debts it had distributed across the globe. Given this crisis, endless finance and repayment projected into the distant future has been transformed into ‘the dead weight of debt’ and led to the emergence of a new class system based upon creditors and debtors. The emergence of this new situation challenges sociologists and policy-makers to think about possible solutions to the socio-economic horror of debt bondage that threatens to destroy the future of not only deeply indebted individuals and their families, but also generations to come who currently stand to inherit a decrepit society that seems hopelessly trapped between a fantasy of endless growth based in financial speculation and a dim recognition of the need for sustainability that finds violent rearticulation in austerity and common sense narratives about the need to balance the books. In this book key thinkers on the topic of debt debate the social, political, and economic, meanings of the state of indebtedness.

This book is concerned with the effects of European migration policy on migrants in the Global South. In particular, it uncovers how border enforcement policies and the crackdown on irregular migration affect the life of migrants in so called ‘transit’ countries outside the European Union. The material for this study is based on ethnographic research in Morocco with migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. The book is mainly concerned with the human and social effects of immobility during the migratory journey. It describes how migration policies in and outside Morocco contribute to a situation where migrants get stuck in Morocco for years, and in the process become increasingly marginalized from participation in society. These prolonged periods of forced immobility negatively affect migrants’ life course, as well as their relation to the present, past and future. This alters their feelings of identity, their social relations to friends and relatives, and their aspirations for the future. The immense human suffering this situation implies has a tendency to further reinforce their wish to leave the country, rather than encouraging them to abandon their migratory projects. The book links these empirical insights on immobility to social theories of time. It argues that the fragmentation of migration processes and immobilization of migrants has an impact on migrants’ view of their own lives as ‘out of sync’ with modernity. Thinking about migration and immobility in relation to time offers a different perspective on migration processes which have until now mostly been theorized through reference to concepts of space.

England, and especially London, remain in the grip of a housing cost crisis marked by extraordinary ratios between median house prices and workplace earnings. House prices have continued to rise over the last decade despite a stagnation in earnings. At the root of the crisis is the problematic relationship that individuals and economies share with residential property. Housing’s social purpose, as home, is frequently relegated behind its economic function, as asset, able to offer a hedge against weakening pensions or source of investment and equity release for individuals, or guarantee rising public revenues, sustain consumer confidence and provide evidence of ‘growth’ for economies. England’s economy – along with that of the rest of the UK – has been on a long transition away from manufacturing for several decades. It is now reliant on services and particularly the financial services associated with real estate consumption and debt production. This book explores the 'UK's economic transition and examines associated housing outcomes. The re-functioning of housing in the twentieth century is a cause of great social inequality, as housing becomes a place to park and extract wealth. What can be done to address this inequality and what role might planning play in delivering fairer outcomes and in re-prioritising housing’s social function?

This book is a socio-historical analysis of the relationship between women, politics and the public sphere. It looks at the legacy of eighteenth-century intellectual groupings which were dominated by women such as members of the ‘bluestocking circles’ and other more radical intellectual and philosophical thinkers such as Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft. These individuals and groups which emerged in the eighteenth century established ‘intellectual spaces’ for the emergence of women public intellectuals in subsequent centuries. Women public intellectuals in the US examined in the book include Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Warren, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Sheryl Sandberg. The implications for the political representation of women in the West and globally is considered, highlighting how women public intellectuals now reflect much more social and cultural diversity. The book is about the fault-lines established in the eighteenth century for later developments in social and political discourse.

The outsourcing of domestic work in the UK has been steadily rising since the 1970s, but little research has considered the experiences of local White British women working as independent cleaning service-providers.Domestic work in India is increasingly researched but mostly with a regional focus. Through a nuanced cross-cultural analysis of outsourced domestic cleaning in a particular social context in the UK and India, this book provides a fresh perspective on domestic work: that outsourced domestic cleaning can be done as work (using mental and manual skills and labour) or as labour (understood as requiring mainly manual labour accompanied by ‘natural’ emotional/affective labour), depending on the work conditions. The book challenges feminist dogma and popular myths about housework.