Suchergebnisse

This book examines how pathologising ideas of failing, chaotic and dysfunctional families create a powerful consensus that Britain is in the grip of a 'parent crisis' and are used to justify increasingly punitive state policies.

This article reflects on ten years of British welfare policy and explores the impacts of these shifts on key groups of mothers who have been demonised and weaponised under an increasingly authoritarian political present.

This article critically examine how Benefits Street - and the broader genre of poverty porn television - functions to embed new forms of 'commonsense' about welfare and worklessness. It argues that such television content and commentary crowds out critical perspectives with what Pierre Bourdieu (1999) called 'doxa', making the social world appear self-evident and requiring no interpretation, and creating new forms of neoliberal commonsense around welfare and social security. The article consider how consent for this commonsense is animated through poverty porn television and the apparently 'spontaneous' (in fact highly editorialized) media debate it generates: particularly via 'the skiver', a figure of social disgust who has re-animated ideas of welfare dependency and deception.

In the aftermath of the 2011 English riots, many political elites, journalists and public commentators obscured the material, sociological and economic factors which contributed to the unrest and instead connected the riots to a problematic kind of 'wanting' – wanting the wrong kinds of things, in a manner and degree that was constructed as illegitimate and vulgar in a time of austerity – and thus constructing the riots as a problem of excessive greed, rampant materialism and social decay. This article reflects upon how the riots played a key role in the political production of a new cultural politics of wanting, whereby wanting is made problematic, suspect, a sign of material fixation and of irresponsible consumerism. It reflects upon this cultural politics within the current austerity regime which manifests through a celebration and romanticisation of post-War restraint and re-animation of thrift practices and frugal living.

This paper examines the cultural politics of 'thrift' and 'tough love'. It reflects upon the significance of notions of 'good parenting' in policy and popular debates around social mobility and aspiration. In particular, it reviews the profound importance of notions of 'poor parenting' in the culturalisation of poverty, whereby poverty is seen to be a symptom of 'poor' conduct and behaviour, rather than of deeply entrenched systemic inequalities. This paper considers how the recent 'austerity' agenda has been taken up as a cultural annotation in the politicisation of parenting, (re)producing nostalgic fantasies of post-war spirit, national resilience and individual family responsibility. This article attends to how discourses of thrift and tough love are stitched together in the current cultural climate of austerity, and tracks these fantasies across a range of policy, media and cultural sites. It argues that these discourses locate the causes of the current financial crisis in spendthrift habits, consumer incompetence, over-consumption and wastefulness. It argues that thrift fantasies generate and circulate powerful cultural figurations of happy gendered restraint, such as the 'happy housewife', which serve as ideological signs of an imagined capacity for families to thrive through times of hardship. This paper maps the emerging affective incitements around austerity, gender, family and the future, in order to question the romances of austerity, and specifically of austerity parenting, and explore how austerity is being incorporated into cruelly optimistic visions of the future, which both deny existing social inequality and promise future happiness through the embrace of thrift.

In the aftermath of the global banking crises, a political economy of permanent state austerity has emerged, driven by and legitimated through a hardening anti-welfare commonsense. We argue that, while there is an excellent evidence base emerging around solidifying negative public attitudes towards welfare, critical policy studies needs to attend to the cultural as well as the political economies through which an anti-welfare commonsense is formed and legitimated. We adopt a 'cultural political economy' approach to examine the cultural and political crafting of 'benefit brood' families within the wider public sphere, to examine the mechanisms through which anti-welfare sentiments are produced and mediated. Through a case study of Mick Philpott, we demonstrate how 'benefits broods' operate both as technologies of control (through which to manage precariat populations), but also as technologies of consent through which a wider and deeper anti-welfare commonsense is effected.

In the aftermath of the global banking crises, a political economy of permanent state austerity has emerged, driven by and legitimated through a hardening anti-welfare commonsense. We argue that, while there is an excellent evidence base emerging around solidifying negative public attitudes towards welfare, critical policy studies needs to attend to the cultural as well as the political economies through which an anti-welfare commonsense is formed and legitimated. To this end, in this article we adopt a 'cultural political economy' (Jessop, 2010; Sum & Jessop, 2013) approach to examine the co-production of the Welfare Reform Act (2012), (and in particular the Household Benefits Cap element of this legislation), and the cultural and political crafting of "benefit brood" families within the wider public sphere, to examine the mechanisms through which anti-welfare sentiments are produced and mediated. Our analysis begins with the case of Mick Philpott, who was found guilty in 2013 of the manslaughter of six of his children. We will show how this case activated 'mechanisms of consent' (Hall et al. 1978) around ideas of acceptable family forms, welfare reform and parental responsibility. Through this case-study, we seek to demonstrate how anti-welfare commonsense is fundamentally dependent upon wider cultural representational practices, through which those who claim welfare come to be constituted as undeserving and morally repugnant, to the extent that the very concept of 'claiming welfare' is reconceived within the social imaginary as debauched. Figures such as 'benefits broods', we argue, operate both as technologies of control (through which to manage precariat populations), but also as technologies of consent through which a wider and deeper anti-welfare commonsense is effected.