Suchergebnisse

This article reflects on the recent 'turn to lived experience' within academia and the third sector in the UK and discusses some issues arising. It then focuses on ways in which these issues might be addressed – including through a methodology employed by ATD Fourth World, an international human rights-based anti-poverty organisation founded after the Second World War that works in partnership with people affected by poverty. ATD developed the 'merging of knowledge and practice' to bring together different kinds of expertise, including that acquired from lived experience, to create a richer form of knowledge and better-informed practice. The article discusses this method and suggests various ways in which the lived experience of poverty can be embedded in public debate, policy and practice. People with experience of poverty can be involved in examining and conveying the many dimensions of that experience; providing training for officials dealing with people in poverty; and designing and evaluating relevant policies.

This article reviews evidence on and possible causes of non-take-up of social security benefits, focusing on the UK, and analyses the implications of the introduction of Universal Credit for take-up. It discusses why (non-)take-up is an important issue, in relation to those affected, the performance of social policies in relation to their goals and the nature of social citizenship. It explains how take-up is usually measured (or estimated) in the UK, giving some recent results, and describing recent policy decisions to halt the publication of figures on take-up of working-age benefits. It investigates explanations put forward about why entitlements are not claimed, highlighting analysis of obstacles at the individual claimant level; barriers within benefits administration; problems with system design; and wider structural issues in society. It examines the implications of the introduction of Universal Credit both for take-up and for the evidence base about it. The integrated nature of Universal Credit was argued to favour higher take-up; but features of its design and administration may have the opposite effect. Evidence is, however, lacking on the outcome of this combination. The conclusion reflects on the future of initiatives to boost benefit take-up, especially those relying on automation – often interpreted in different ways. It argues in favour of taking more account of the reasons for non-take-up relating to the nature of potential claimants' relationship with the state, and the characteristics of benefits left unclaimed, rather than assuming that administrative information and automation will overcome all the obstacles currently resulting in non-take-up.

Alexander Berkman's 1912 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is a significant book in the development of American anti-prison politics, not despite, but because of its ambivalent approach to prisons. I trace through Berkman's book and archive an unresolved tension between two approaches to the prison: advocacy for political prisoners, whereby the prison is a state tool for suppressing radical ideas, and advocacy against the politics of prisons, whereby the prison is an "aggravated counterpart" of social structures and a site of struggle. Berkman's ambivalence between these approaches amid his memoirs and activism exemplifies the complex development of U.S. thinking on prisons and enduring tensions in contemporary prison politics.

This article explores the advent of Medicare, the process of desegregation of hospitals in the South, and the resistance to this governmental oversight. Events at the Medical College Hospital of South Carolina are described as an exemplar to illustrate the struggle for healthcare justice for Black Americans where the struggle for racially integrated healthcare ended in a hospital workers strike. Four hundred Black women walked off their jobs and marched in picket lines for 113 days without pay before the economic and human rights issues were resolved. As the cause for racial justice continues in America, an understanding of this story which represents the beginning of the long struggle for health equity which impacts our profession, and our patients, can benefit all nurses. This article reviews this important exemplar in its time period and offers a description of current efforts and implications for the profession of nursing.

This review essay discusses the educational resources on democratic socialism that the author encountered and in some cases co-created after retiring from academia and working to develop the pedagogical and activist missions of the Democratic Socialists of America Fund as Chair of the DSA Fund Board. Based on this experience, it offers his ideal version of Socialism 101.