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Ruth Sheldon explores the potential for reusing existing qualitative data to inform policy, with a focus on ageing policy

This article is concerned with what happens to precarious community buildings in times of austerity. It responds to a landscape of capitalist realism, in which instrumental, economic forms of value are mobilised to justify the closure of ordinary buildings whose survival is not identified as a political priority. The study focuses on two London cases of a library and an elderly day centre under threat of closure, and traces how grammars of austerity rendered these buildings substitutable. Considering how abstract sociological conceptions of value/s can struggle to break into the embedded common sense of austerity, the authors explore how ethnographic practices of collaboration and attentiveness can help amplify alternative expressions of the meanings of these buildings for their communities. Enacting a form of ethnographic witnessing, which learns from Wittgenstein, the authors highlight the creative, vernacular registers and gestures of library users and day centre members, and show how these were anchored in the buildings themselves. In this way, the article supplements noisier, more hyperbolic accounts of the violence of austerity by amplifying quotidian responses, which express how ordinary buildings and the forms of life they sustain, matter.

"For over four decades, events in Palestine-Israel have provoked raging conflicts within British universities around issues of free speech, 'extremism', antisemitism and Islamophobia. But why is this conflict so significant for student activists living at such a geographical distance from the region itself? And what role do emotive, polarised communications around Palestine-Israel play in the life of British academic institutions committed to the ideal of free expression? This book draws on original ethnographic research with student activists on different sides of this conflict to initiate a conversation with students, academics and members of the public who are concerned with the transnational politics of Palestine-Israel and with the changing role of the public university. It shows how, in an increasingly globalised world that is shaped by entangled histories of European antisemitism and colonial violence, ethnography can open up ethical responses to questions of justice"--Publisher's description

AbstractThis article intervenes in feminist anthropological debates about marriage within Western cosmopolitan, 'post‐traditional' contexts through a close ethnographic examination of food and ritualized meals among Haredi Jews in London. We focus on this diasporic religious Jewish minority, whose marital practices have been the object of debates over marriage, gender, and cultural difference in cosmopolitan London. Learning from ethnographic and conjugal instances of hunger around Haredi dining tables, we explore the broader question of how heterosexual marriages endure in the face of struggles for intimacy and freedom between different genders. By focusing on what can be learnt about marriage through mealtime rituals with religious significance, we develop a response rooted in a form of Jewish relational ethics that has been repressed within 'Western' liberal culture. This approach addresses some tenacious dualisms at play in the anthropology and politics of marriage and articulates a vernacular dialectical grammar of desire, tradition, freedom, and love.

Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate how focusing on the good enhances social theory. This is the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life