scholarly journals (In)coherent subjects? The politics of conceptualising resistance in the UK asylum system

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
Sarah M Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Grounding Resistance ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
The Uk

Many accounts of resistance within systems of migration control pivot upon a coherent migrant subject, one that is imbued with political agency and posited as oppositional to particular forms of sovereign power. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the role of creativity within the UK asylum system, I argue that grounding resistance with a stable, coherent and agentic subject, aligns with oppositional narratives (of power vs resistance), and thereby risks negating the entangled politics of the (in)coherence of subject formation, and how this can contain the potential to disrupt, disturb or interrupt the practices and premise of the UK asylum system. I suggest that charity groups and subjects should not be written out of narratives of resistance apriori because they engage with ‘the state’: firstly, because to argue that there is a particular form that resistance should take is to place limits around what counts as the political; and secondly, because to ‘remain oppositional’ is at odds with an (in)coherent subject. I show how accounts which highlight a messy and ambiguous subjectivity, could be bought into understandings of resistance. This is important because as academics, we too participate in the delineation of the political and what counts as resistance. In predetermining what subjects, and forms of political action count as resistance we risk denying recognition to those within this system.

scholarly journals Student Protests. Three Periods of University Governance

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 524-539
Author(s):  
Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat ◽  
Bob Jeffery
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Political Action ◽  
University Governance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Student Protests ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Right ◽  
The University

Exploring the idea of student protests as an autonomous object of research and discussion, this paper leads to the understanding that the transforming role of the university and its governance defines the possibilities for the political role of students. In this perspective, there is a particular constellation of the different forms of higher education governance that provides students with the right and even the responsibility of protesting as politically engaged citizens of the university and of the state. Approaching the transformation of the models of university governance as a set of archaeologically organised states this paper identifies the sequential roles provided to the students and the meaning of their protests and demonstrations. After visiting some antecedents of more contemporaneous student movements and protests, this paper focuses on the UK to explore three manifestations of university governance that can be roughly differentiated as the enduring democratic period that extends from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, the globalisation period that extends from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s and as the post-millennial turn. These periods, embodying three different styles of governance of higher education, not only demonstrate conformity with the political and economic contexts in which they are embeded, they also correspond to particular socio-technological and communicative ecosystems and determine the specificities of the role of the students and their capacity for political action.

Disablism, Planning, and the Built Environment

1993 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
R F Imrie ◽  
P E Wells
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Land Use Planning ◽  
Local Authority ◽  
Planning System ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
The Uk

In the last decade access for disabled people to public buildings has become an important part of the political agenda. Yet, one of the main forms of discrimination which still persists against disabled people is an inaccessible built environment. In particular, statutory authorities have been slow to acknowledge the mobility and access needs of disabled people, and the legislative base to back up local authority policies remains largely ineffectual and weak. In this paper, the interrelationships between disability and the built environment are considered by focusing on the role of the UK land-use planning system in securing access provision for disabled people.

scholarly journals ‘Moving life stories tell us just why politics matters’: Personal narratives in tabloid anti-austerity campaigns

Journalism ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 1346-1363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jen Birks
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Civil Society Organisations

This article examines the use of personal narratives in two tabloid newspaper campaigns against a controversial welfare reform popularly known as the ‘bedroom tax’. It aims first to evaluate whether the personal narratives operate as political testimony to challenge government accounts of welfare reform and dominant stereotypes of benefits claimants, and second to assess the potential for and limits to progressive advocacy in popular journalism. The study uses content analysis of 473 articles over the course of a year in the Daily Mirror and Sunday People newspapers, and qualitative analysis of a sub-set of 113 articles to analyse the extent to which the campaign articles extrapolated from the personal to the general, and the role of ‘victim–witnesses’ in articulating their own subjectivity and political agency. The analysis indicates that both newspapers allowed affected individuals to express their own subjectivity to challenge stereotypes, but it was civil society organisations and opinion columnists who most explicitly extrapolated from the personal to the political. Collectively organised benefits claimants were rarely quoted, and there was some evidence of ventriloquisation of the editorial voice in the political criticisms of victim–witnesses. However, a campaigning columnist in the Mirror more actively empowered some of those affected to speak directly to politicians. This indicates the value of campaigning journalism when it is truly engaged in solidarity with those affected, rather than instrumentalising victim–witnesses to further the newspapers’ campaign goals.

When Peace Kills Politics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharath Srinivasan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Close Range ◽  
Civil Politics ◽  
Political Realm

When Peace Kills Politics explains the role of international peacemaking in reproducing violence and political authoritarianism in Sudan and South Sudan in recent decades. Srinivasan explains how Sudan’s landmark north–south peace process that achieved the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement fueled war in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile alongside how it contributed to Sudan’s failed political transformation and newly independent South Sudan’s rapid descent into civil war. Concluding with the conspicuous absence of ‘peace’ when non-violent revolutionary political change came to Sudan in 2019, Srinivasan examines at close range why outsiders’ peace projects may displace civil politics and raise the political currency of violence. With an original contribution to theorizing peace and peacemaking drawing upon the political thought of Hannah Arendt, the book is an analysis of the tragic shortcomings of attempting to build a non-violent political realm through neat designs and tools of compulsion, where the end goal of peace becomes caught up in idealized constitutional texts, technocratic templates and deals on sharing spoils. When Peace Kills Politics demands a radical rethinking of the project of peace in civil wars, grounded in a more earnest commitment to civil political action.

The Last Days of the UK Film Council

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Doyle
Keyword(s):  
Civil Servants ◽  
The Political ◽  
Coalition Government ◽  
Key Players ◽  
Political Background ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Considerable Detail ◽  
Film Policy

Based on key players’ testimony and an extensive documented record, this chapter initially discusses the political background to the fraught merger talks between the BFI and the UKFC in 2009-2010, along with the uncertain role of the DCMS. It then turns to consider the shock decision to close the UKFC taken by Conservative ministers in the DCMS serving in the Coalition government elected in May 2010. Various possible reasons for closure are evaluated in considerable detail and the impact on the UKFC is described. The account analyses each of the steps taken by the DCMS to devise a new landscape of film support post-UKFC, with the BFI assuming many functions after extensive negotiation with ministers and civil servants. Next, the BFI’s new turn in film policy is considered. A range of views on the closure decision, both pro and con, is discussed.

13. Small Parties and Law-making

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Arnott ◽  
Richard Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Parliamentary Procedure ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Law Making

This chapter discusses the role of smaller parties in the law-making process. General elections in the UK are conducted with an electoral system which militates against the representation of smaller political parties, particularly those having no strong support at the regional level. However, events at Westminster over the last decade have increased the prominence of smaller parties in the operation of parliamentary business. The chapter first considers the role of small parties in the UK Parliament, committees and legislation, as well as their participation in backbench debates before examining how the political and electoral context of Parliament, especially in the twenty-first century, has affected the representation of smaller parties and the ways in which reforms to parliamentary procedure since the 1980s have enhanced the role of the second opposition party. It suggests that Parliament today offers more opportunities for smaller political parties to influence debate and policy, but this remains quite limited.

scholarly journals Norman Henry Ashton CBE. 11 September 1913 – 4 January 2000

2005 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip J. Luthert ◽  
Cynthia Medford Langley
Keyword(s):  
Eye Disease ◽  
The Political ◽  
Community Studies ◽  
Ocular Toxocariasis ◽  
Cotton Wool Spots ◽  
Ocular Infections ◽  
Retinal Vascular Disease ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Insight Into

Norman Ashton, the first ophthalmic pathologist in the UK, spent his career furthering the understanding and treatment of eye disease and exercising the political acumen to garner the funding necessary to advance this new field. His demonstration of the obliteration of growing retinal endothelial cells caused by the excessive administration of oxygen in premature infants is perhaps his best–known work. Apart from this, his casts of the choroidal and trabecular meshwork circulation and Schlemm's canal were the first to display the exact anatomy of these structures to the ophthalmic community. Studies of the pathogenesis of cotton wool spots, neovascularization and microaneurysms and the behaviour of retinal vessels contributed lastingly to the understanding of retinal vascular disease. With associates he demonstrated the role of the endothelium in the blood–retina barrier. Investigation of diabetic, hypertensive and other retinopathies provided fundamental contributions to the comprehension of these conditions. Original studies established an insight into amoebic ocular infections, ocular toxocariasis, nosematosis and a collection of eye diseases in animals and fish. Fight for Sight and the European Ophthalmic Pathological Society owe their beginnings, in large part, to his foresight and energy. He is remembered as a worthy researcher, a witty speaker, a respected supervisor and a kind man.

Transnational Migrants' Negotiations of Formal and Cultural Citizenship

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhán Ní Chatháin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Substantial Role ◽  
Irish Immigration ◽  
Transnational Migrants ◽  
The Ideal

This article highlights the substantial role of Irish state governmentalities in structuring migrants' ‘possible fields of action’ (Foucault 1982: 790), while taking account of the agency of migrant subjects, albeit constrained, in negotiating Irish immigration regulation. It is based on data gathered from eighteen migrant mothers of Irish citizens and argues that it is important to recognise the political agency of migrants in generating new transnational modes of belonging despite the ways in which the state circumscribes their capacities to engage in transnational practices and maintain transnational relationships. This group of migrants simultaneously endeavoured to maintain transnational practices and relationships while cultivating local identifications. Although they had complex and contradictory attitudes to citizenship, the unifying theme was that social and spatial mobility are not inimical to local belonging. However, their local and transnational practices were impeded by prevailing discourses and regulations drawing on exclusionary configurations of citizenship which combined racialised notions of Irishness with neoliberalised concepts of the ideal citizen.

Sir Simonds D'Ewes and the levying of ship money, 1635–1640

1994 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. P. Salt
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the relationship between constitutional ideas and political action during the 1630s by comparing the privately expressed ideas of Sir Simonds D'Ewes regarding ship money with his conduct regarding the levy, especially while he was sheriff of Suffolk in 1639–40. The first section investigates the constitutionalist views expressed in D'Ewes's ‘autobiography’, unpublished during his lifetime, and their relationship to D'Ewes's attitude to the political role of the levy. The second section studies D'Ewes's conduct as sheriff, in which he gave almost no expression to constitutionalist ideas, and suggests that he struck a middle course between neglect and zeal, while finding means to oppose the levy through his connections at court. The third section seeks to establish the reasons for the inconsistencies between D'Ewes's privately expressed ideas and his public conduct, which may have lain in a belief that, in the prevailing political situation, criticism of the levy had, in order to be effective, to be expressed in terms acceptable to potentially sympathetic courtiers; D'Ewes adapted the tone of his comments on ship money to his audience in order to achieve political ends, but had also to act in ways which would make that tone convincing. Participation in the collection of ship money was therefore not inconsistent with opposition to it.

scholarly journals Political Performance and Leadership Persona: The UK Labour Party Conference of 2012

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gaffney ◽  
Amarjit Lahel
Keyword(s):  
Political Process ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Party Leader ◽  
The Political ◽  
Leadership Performance ◽  
Political Performance ◽  
Ed Miliband ◽  
The Uk

This article is a contribution to an emerging scholarship on the role of rhetoric, persona and celebrity, and the effects of performance on the political process. We analyse party leader Ed Miliband at the UK Labour Party Conference in Manchester in 2012. Our analysis identifies how, through performance of ‘himself’ and the beginnings of the deployment of an alternative party narrative centred on ‘One Nation’, Ed Miliband began to revise his ‘received persona’. By using a range of rhetorical and other techniques, Miliband began to adapt the Labour narrative to the ‘personalized political’. The article sets out the theoretical framework for the analysis and returns to the implications for the theory of leadership performance in its conclusion.

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