scholarly journals The second pandemic: Examining structural inequality through reverberations of COVID-19 in Europe

2022 ◽  
Vol 292 ◽  
pp. 114634
Author(s):  
Amelia Fiske ◽  
Ilaria Galasso ◽  
Johanna Eichinger ◽  
Stuart McLennan ◽  
Isabella Radhuber ◽  
...  
Author(s):  
Shuang Chen

The book explores the social economic processes of inequality produced by differential state entitlements. Drawing on uniquely rich source materials from central and local archives, the book provides an unprecedented, comprehensive view of the creation of a socio-economic and political hierarchy under the Eight Banners in the Qing dynasty in what is now Shuangcheng County, Heilongjiang province. Shuangcheng was settled by bannermen from urban Beijing and elsewhere in rural Manchuria in the nineteenth century. The state classified the immigrants into distinct categories, each associated with differentiated land entitlements. By reconstructing the history of settlement and land distribution in this county, the book shows that patterns of wealth stratification and the underlying social hierarchy were not merely imposed by the state from the top-down but created and reinforced by local people through practices on the ground. In the course of pursuing their own interests, settlers internalized the distinctions created by the state through its system of unequal land entitlements. The tensions built into the unequal land entitlements therefore shaped the identities of immigrant groups, and this social hierarchy persisted after the fall of the Qing in 1911. The book offers an in-depth understanding of the key factors that contributed to social stratification in agrarian societies in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Moreover, it also sheds light on the many parallels between the stratification system in Qing-dynasty Shuangcheng and the structural inequality in contemporary China.


Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia

In this chapter, stories of young men and women who live in basti (slum settlements) near one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Pune, India, are analyzed. It is argued that the basti youth’s “capacity to aspire” is not just an individual trait or a psychological ability. Rather, their aspirations are shaped by their caste identities, structural conditions of poverty, their narrative capacity, their schooling in vernacular language, and the prestige accorded to speakers of English language in urban India. The stories of the basti youth are characterized as dispossessed because they are shaped by and connected to the possessions of the dominant class who live nearby and the unequal structural conditions of their basti. These stories reveal that globalization, by and large, has exacerbated the structural inequality in the slum settlements in Pune. Structural inequality refers to a system that creates and perpetuates an unequal distribution of material and psychological privileges .


2016 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Farrugia ◽  
John Smyth ◽  
Tim Harrison

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Ngwena

The article considers the scope and limits of law as an instrument for facilitating equitable access to health care in South Africa. The focus is on exploring the extent to which the notion of substantive equality in access to health care services that is implicitly guaranteed by the Constitution and supported by current health care reforms, is realisable for patients seeking treatment. The article highlights the gap between the idea of substantive equality in the Constitution and the resources at the disposal of the health care sector and the country as a whole. It is submitted that though formal equality in access to health care services has been realised, substantive equality is currently unattainable, if it is attainable at all, on account of entrenched structural inequality, general poverty and a high burden of disease.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooklynn K. Hitchens ◽  
Yasser Arafat Payne

This secondary analysis examines low-income, street-identified single Black mothers aged 18 to 35 years in Wilmington, Delaware. This study is guided by the following question: To what extent do family composition and criminal record/street activity shape notions of Black single motherhood? “Sites of resilience” theory informs this study by providing a reconceptualization of street life and the phenomenological experiences of street-identified Black women. This analysis draws on 310 surveys, 6 individual interviews, 3 dual interviews, 2 group interviews, and extensive field observations. Findings reveal how these women experience single motherhood within the context of blocked opportunity and structural inequality. Results also indicate that most women socially reproduced childhood attitudes and conditions, including “fatherless” homes and single motherhood. Use and sales of narcotics and incarceration were primary factors for why their children’s father didn’t reside in the home. Findings also suggest that number of children, arrest and incarceration rates, and educational and employment statuses are predictive of marital status in the women.


2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110663
Author(s):  
Lerato Thakholi ◽  
Bram Büscher

In 2016, South Africa launched its National Biodiversity Economy Strategy. This strategy aims to facilitate the development of a ‘wildlife economy’ as a solution to unemployment, loss of biodiversity and rural development. Central to the strategy is the role of private conservation actors, who keenly posit their commercial model as the best way to achieve these objectives. This stands in sharp contrast to recent critiques that suggest that private conservation reinforces structural inequality by denying access to land and perpetuating unjust labour conditions. Using ethnographic data from the South African Lowveld region that includes the Kruger National Park, the paper takes these points further by arguing that a rapidly growing alliance between private conservation and property developers actively conserve inequality by maintaining and even extending spatial injustice in the region. Two popular recent manifestations of this alliance in particular, share block systems that distribute ownership of access to real estate in private reserves and wildlife housing estates, have established new conservation-property linkages that entrench capitalist socioecological fixes. Not only do these initiatives lead to further engrained spatial injustice, we conclude that this conservation-property alliance at the centre of the ‘wildlife economy’ also willingly sacrifices environmental sustainability on the altar of white conservation imaginations and private profit.


Author(s):  
Zanib Rasool

This chapter considers some questions related to policy development, as policy impacts all areas of community life. In particular, it explores the concept of social cohesion in neighbourhoods, which is currently a key policy issue. The context for this includes internal conflicts between groups competing for the same scarce resources, structural inequality, housing and environment neglect, crime, and disorder, creating segregation and a culture of ‘us and them’. Moreover, this chapter finds that arts methodology is a tool for ethnic minority women and young people to negotiate boundaries and hostile territories and to engage in policy questions on community cohesion through photography, portraits, and poetry.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Taylor ◽  
Dave O’Brien

The attitudes and values of cultural and creative workers are an important element of explaining current academic interest in inequality and culture. To date, quantitative approaches to this element of cultural and creative inequality have been overlooked, particularly in British research. This article investigates the attitudes of those working in creative jobs with a unique dataset: a web survey of creative workers’ attitudes (n = 2487). Using principal components analysis and regression, we have three main findings. First, in contrast to Richard Florida’s thesis on the attitudes and values of ‘the creative class’, our respondents’ attitudes were no more meritocratic than those of the general population. Second, those with the strongest belief in meritocracy in the sector are those in the most privileged positions, specifically those are best rewarded by the sector. Third, our research provides support for existing qualitative research on attitudes in the cultural sector, in which the worst rewarded workers are most aware of structural inequality. We conclude that the attitudes held by creative workers, and who holds which attitudes, make it unlikely that access to the sector and trajectories of individual progression within the sector will change. These findings also have important implications for current public interest in whether access to creative work is limited to those from privileged backgrounds.


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