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Designed to address practical questions, applied ethics is one of the most exciting areas in contemporary philosophy. Yet the relevance of ethical theories to social policy has been under-explored. The book is concerned with applying debates, theories and methods from moral philosophy to contemporary ethical issues relating to the disciplinary field (social policy) investigating the interactions of social problems, justice and wellbeing. This book presents introductions to the three most influential moral philosophies — consequentialism, Kantianism and virtue ethics — then relates these to some of the most urgent questions in contemporary public debates about the future of welfare services. These include taxing unhealthy habits, drug legalisation, parental choice in education, abortion, euthanasia, and migration and cultural diversity. In each case the author asks a perennial question: what are the legitimate boundaries of state action and individual liberty?

A Bourdieusian contribution to studies of affect provides a more comprehensive understanding of the everyday moments that make, transform and remake the social contours of inequality, and how those relations are contested and resisted. By teasing out the affective elements already implicit in concepts like habitus, illusio, cultural capital, field and symbolic violence, this book develops a theory of affective affinities to consider how emotions and feelings are central to how class is affectively delineated along with material and symbolic relations. This includes theorising habitus as one’s history rolled up into an affective ball of immanent dispositions, an assemblage of embodied affective charges. Sketching fields as having their own affective atmospheres and structures of feeling, while considering everyday settings that the concept of field cannot capture. Drawing upon illusio, social gravity and social magic to unpack how the embodied nature of the forms of capital mean they operate in affective economies mediating transmissions of affective violence. The book concludes by critically engaging with aspects of social change due to the rise of reflexivity, irony and cynicism and proposing the figure of the accumulated being to challenge the dominance of homo economicus.

This book develops a Gramscian account of contemporary governance. It critiques the fashionable view that there has been a shift from hierarchy to networks, arguing instead that the ideology of network governance is part of the neoliberal hegemonic project. However, there are major barriers to accomplishing this project.

The starting point of this book is the fracture of the author's right arm in the grounds of a hotel in the USA. What begins as an accident becomes a journey into some critical themes of modern Western culture: the crisis of embodiment and the perfect self; the confusion between body and identity; the commodification of bodies and body parts; the intrusive surveillance and profiteering of medicine and the law; the problem of ageing; and the identification of women, particularly, with bodies — from the intensely ambiguous two-in-one state of pregnancy to women's later transformation into unproductive, brittle skeletons. This book mixes personal experience (the author's and other people's) with ‘facts’ derived from other literatures, including the history of medicine, neurology, the sociology of health and illness, philosophy, and legal discourses on the right to life and people as victims of a greedy litigation system. The book spans the genres of fiction/non-fiction, autobiography and social theory.

This book brings together scholars, artists, practitioners, and community activists to explore the possibilities for — and tensions of — social justice work through collaboration between communities and the academy. Amid a widespread institutional emphasis on increased involvement and co-production with the community, what can we expect when long-established community-oriented research practices collide with the day-to-day work of activism? How should we think about the key tenets and terms of that research, and the ongoing critique of them mounted by activists, artists, and other community members? Deploying case studies from the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, and Canada, and taking in universities, independent research organizations, and museums and galleries, this book breaks new ground in our understanding of the possibilities, and pitfalls, of co-production.