scholarly journals Activating the Welfare Subject: The Problem of Agency

Sociology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia Morris
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Design And Implementation ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
A Site ◽  
Welfare Reforms ◽  
The Way

While accepting Banton’s recently expressed view that sociology and social policy are distinct disciplines, this article argues that times of radical change can profitably bring the two into closer dialogue. Considering an argument from Emirbayer and Mische that agency becomes especially apparent in unsettled times, it focuses on conceptions of agency at play in the design and implementation of recent UK welfare reforms, and in subsequent legal challenges. Identifying a series of key measures in the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 and the Welfare and Work Act of 2016, this article examines the challenges that have ensued, and the way that agency is revealed as both a site of disciplinary control and as a focus for contestation, pitting the purposive rationality of welfare reform against the practical reason that emerges from claimant experience.

What Is "Your" Race?

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Color Line ◽  
White Race ◽  
Asian Race ◽  
The Way

America is preoccupied with race statistics—perhaps more than any other nation. Do these statistics illuminate social reality and produce coherent social policy, or cloud that reality and confuse social policy? Does America still have a color line? Who is on which side? Does it have a different “race” line—the nativity line—separating the native born from the foreign born? You might expect to answer these and similar questions with the government's “statistical races,” but this book observes that this is not likely and shows why the way we count by race is flawed. The book calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical “Asian race.” One that once tried to divide the “white race” into “good whites” and “bad whites,” and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains 400 years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated 20 years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America—Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better? This book clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It is not an overnight task—particularly the explosive step of dropping today's race question from the census—but the book argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.

Praxeology, Imperatives, and Shifts of View

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benj Hellie
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
First Person ◽  
Third Person ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Practical Metaphysics ◽  
The Way

Recent neo-Anscombean work in praxeology (aka ‘philosophy of practical reason’), salutarily, shifts focus from an alienated ‘third-person’ viewpoint on practical reason to an embedded ‘first-person’ view: for example, the ‘naive rationalizations’ of Michael Thompson, of form ‘I am A-ing because I am B-ing’, take up the agent’s view, in the thick of action. Less salutary, in its premature abandonment of the first-person view, is an interpretation of these naive rationalizations as asserting explanatory links between facts about organically structured agentive processes in progress, followed closely by an inflationary project in ‘practical metaphysics’. If, instead, praxeologists chase first-personalism all the way down, both fact and explanation vanish (and with them, the possibility of metaphysics): what is characteristically practical is endorsement of nonpropositional imperatival content, chained together not explanatorily, but through limits on intelligibility. A connection to agentive behavior must somehow be reestablished—but this can (and can only) be done ‘transcendentally’.

‘Yr Beast’: Gender Parrhesia and Punk Trans Womanhoods

2021 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-134
Author(s):  
Jay Szpilka
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Trans Women ◽  
A Site ◽  
Significant Attention ◽  
The Way

While the subject of women’s activity in historical and contemporary punk scenes has attracted significant attention, the presence of trans women in punk has received comparatively little research, in spite of their increasing visibility and long history in punk. This article examines the conditions for trans women’s entrance in punk and the challenges and opportunities that it offers for their self-assertion. By linking Michel Foucault’s notion of parrhesia with the way trans women in punk do their gender, an attempt is made at showing how the embodied experience of a trans woman making herself heard from the punk stage can serve as a site of ‘gender pluralism’.

scholarly journals Laws and Emerging Technologies

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Esther Salmerón-Manzano
Keyword(s):  
Information Technologies ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Legal Issues ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
The World ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The Way

New technologies and so-called communication and information technologies are transforming our society, the way in which we relate to each other, and the way we understand the world. By a wider extension, they are also influencing the world of law. That is why technologies will have a huge impact on society in the coming years and will bring new challenges and legal challenges to the legal sector worldwide. On the other hand, the new communications era also brings many new legal issues such as those derived from e-commerce and payment services, intellectual property, or the problems derived from the use of new technologies by young people. This will undoubtedly affect the development, evolution, and understanding of law. This Special Issue has become this window into the new challenges of law in relation to new technologies.

scholarly journals Architecture of memory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zohra Akbari
Keyword(s):  
Collective Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Successive Change ◽  
Successful Approach ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Way

Buildings and city forms are restructured and reused through time in response to evolving contexts, with each successive change leaving traces of the past that accumulate as layers. Collective knowledge and memory are strongly tied to these artifacts, which provide the depth and continuity necessary for the affirmation of identity. Dramatic changes in the contemporary city have prompted a reconsideration of the way architecture adapts, and highlights the need for a creative approach to change and advancement. A successful approach would meaningfully engage the past and memory to record and transmit vital aspects of culture and history while simultaneously using them to inform future actions. The palimpsest as an evolving record provides a productive framework for this kind of transformation, and uncovers the tangible and intangible layers of a site to protect and project the future layers.

scholarly journals Branding Stratford: Social Representation and the Re-making of Place

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Desiderio
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Regeneration ◽  
Social Representation ◽  
London 2012 ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
The Media ◽  
The One ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Way

As part of the societal world, architecture and urban space do not have any ‘objective’ quality. They are representations. Their meaning is produced through the negotiation and interaction of individuals, groups and classes. Yet, such ‘subjective’ meanings do have a ‘material’ relevance, as they reflect a dialectical process between the functions, forms, ownership and practices of space. They reveal construal and construction: the way in which architectural spaces are represented on the one hand, and the way in which they are physically constructed and used on the other. Nowhere does this become more evident in our current society than in the arguments around urban renewal and regeneration. The Westfield Stratford City is a typical example. Part of the vast process of the urban regeneration of East London prompted by London 2012 Olympic Games, Westfield is a massive complex of luxury shops, restaurants, bars and five star hotels. It is seen by investors and local and national political authorities as capable of transforming Stratford into a site for shopping, tourism and leisure. It does this in numerous ways, one of which involves reconfiguring the image of the region through the press and media - through visual imagery and linguistic manipulations that promote a neoliberal agenda of gentrification that simultaneously devalue the existent societal structures and communities in the area. This paper offers a Critical Discourse Analysis of the manipulation of Stratford’s image by government, business and the media and suggests that the purely financially motivated misrepresentation it reveals, is typical of the urban regeneration ethos at work across the developed world today.

scholarly journals We Need to Talk about Impact: Why Social Policy Academics need to Engage with the UK's Research Impact Agenda

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHERINE E. SMITH ◽  
ELLEN STEWART
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Health Inequalities ◽  
Research Impact ◽  
Policy Response ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Policy Relevance ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

AbstractOf all the social sciences, social policy is one of the most obviously policy-orientated. One might, therefore, expect a research and funding agenda which prioritises and rewards policy relevance to garner an enthusiastic response among social policy scholars. Yet, the social policy response to the way in which major funders and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) are now prioritising ‘impact’ has been remarkably muted. Elsewhere in the social sciences, ‘research impact’ is being widely debated and a wealth of concerns about the way in which this agenda is being pursued are being articulated. Here, we argue there is an urgent need for social policy academics to join this debate. First, we employ interviews with academics involved in health inequalities research, undertaken between 2004 and 2015, to explore perceptions, and experiences, of the ‘impact agenda’ (an analysis which is informed by a review of guidelines for assessing ‘impact’ and relevant academic literature). Next, we analyse high- and low-scoring REF2014 impact case studies to assess whether these concerns appear justified. We conclude by outlining how social policy expertise might usefully contribute to efforts to encourage, measure and reward research ‘impact’.

What Was Gained

2018 ◽  
pp. 286-310
Author(s):  
George R. Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Welfare Reforms

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's major findings. The road to the welfare state of the 1940s was not a wide and straight thoroughfare through Victorian and Edwardian Britain. As the previous chapters have made clear, the story of British social policy from 1830 to 1950 is really two separate stories joined together in the years immediately before the Great War. The first is a tale of increasing stinginess toward the poor by the central and local governments, while the second is the story of the construction of a national safety net, culminating in the Beveridge Report and Labour's social policies of 1946–48. The prototype for the welfare reforms of the twentieth century cannot be found in the Victorian Poor Law. The chapter then offers some thoughts regarding the reasons for the shifts in social welfare policy from the 1830s to the 1940s.

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