SOC002010 Archives

Remaking Welfare in the Netherlands

Across Europe, welfare reforms are reshaping not only systems of support but the very terms of citizenship and state care. Alongside conditional regimes designed to move citizens off benefits, another formation is emerging: the intimate welfare state – a mode of governance that operates through proximity, collaboration and personal engagement.

Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with Amsterdam’s Parent and Child Teams, Remaking Welfare in the Netherlands examines how this intimate welfare state is imagined and enacted by frontline professionals. The book attends to the fantasies, ethical commitments and everyday dilemmas that animate these reforms, including the negotiation of race within ostensibly universalist frameworks of care.

The book argues that this emerging formation has a psychic life of its own: animated by aspirations toward a friendly, caring and accessible state, yet haunted by enduring fears of bureaucratic intrusion and state violence. Bringing ethnographic insight into conversation with debates on welfare and social policy, the book offers a fresh perspective on contemporary transformations of governance in the Netherlands and on the political futures now being forged across Europe.

Postcolonial Citizens

According to the International Organisation for Migration, the Bangladeshi diaspora is one of the world’s largest with around 2.4 million members, and the United Kingdom and the United States are two of the primary countries of settlement. Postcolonial Citizens examines the experiences of different generations of Muslim Bangladeshi migrants in London and Los Angeles. Although narratives of globalisation suggest increasing homogeneity this book shows how the Bangladeshi diaspora experience has been shaped by their cities of settlement. We examine how the context of reception influences experiences of citizenship. Crucial to this analysis is the concept of ‘racial regimes’ developed by Cedric Robinson and Alana Lentin, which demonstrates how ‘race’ and racial hierarchies are (re)produced in different historical and geographical contexts and how they evolve over time.

Since 9/11, the transnational practices of diasporic Muslims have received significant negative attention, as both security threats and impediments to citizenship. Postcolonial Citizens unpacks the mutually constitutive relationship between citizenship and transnationalism by focusing on three transnational domains – remittances, religion and investment – in relation to Bangladesh-origin migrants in the US and the UK. It is a tale of two cities separated by the Atlantic, and by the respective, albeit interconnected, histories of colonialism and settler colonialism but which remain intimately interlinked in the current conjuncture.

Chemical Exposures

Exposure to toxic chemicals has become common place, yet the study of both chemicals and toxicity has tended to remain at the margins of the social sciences. This volume addresses the entangled landscape of toxic chemicals in the Anthropocene, drawing together research by anthropologists, geographers, artists, and scholars in science and technology studies. The contributors understand chemical pollution as not simply pervasive, but multiple, situated and unequal, profoundly relational and affective, traversing temporal and spatial scales as it continuously disrupts and reconfigures the relations between the geological and the human, the political and the material, and between the social and natural sciences and humanities. Chemical Exposures explores the accumulation of toxic substances, the multiple scales of exposure, and the diverse ways in which exposure can be both sensed and visualised.

City-Heat

Heat has become the metaphor of choice through which politics, philosophy and science speak about the current polycrisis. Heat, in these instances, is primarily translated into temperature metrics such as thresholds and tipping points that feed predictions regarding the planet’s future. Yet, conceiving of heat in degrees flattens the complexity of lived experience and obscures the different ways in which communities respond to a hotter world.

City-Heat breaks with temperature-based understandings of heat and delves into a richer, more emic exploration of its socio-cultural and sensory dimensions. The chapters cover a range of topics explored through interactions with a diverse group of interlocutors, spanning from the daily struggles of hustling youths to the work of geothermal engineers, spiritual warfare, pervasive issues of toxicity and pollution confronted by herbalists, and the medicinal practices to which the interlocutors turned in their efforts to forge more viable pathways into the future.

Through these ethnographic terrains, the book traces how the interlocutors sense, and make sense of, what remains viable under hotter conditions across socio-cultural, infrastructural, spiritual, metabolic and moral registers. Nick Rahier argues that these hotter conditions give rise to new forms of thermal consciousness that shape how people move, work, relate and sustain the very possibility of ‘cooler’ horizons.

Offers That Cannot Be Refused

What makes an offer impossible to refuse? Combining original ethnography with compelling storytelling, this book traces the social life of extortion across Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Ecuador, Guatemala, India, Italy, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom. The research is grounded in collaborative and comparative ethnography conducted by a team of anthropologists, bringing together fieldwork from across the world to reveal how extortive logics shape different domains of life, following the circulation of threats and the distribution of intimidation across society.

The result is a gripping read about the ordinariness of extortion beyond conventional organised crime and mafia spheres. The chapters document how the strength of extortion lies in the gradual and complicit inclusion of individuals and populations within relationships that are simultaneously attractive and violent – capturing the overlapping dimensions of compulsion and choice that define so many of today’s livelihoods. In doing so, this book illustrates the dynamics of coercion, force and consent, and offers a fresh perspective on economic violence that moves away from exclusive legalistic definitions of extortion.

The Babushka Phenomenon

The Babushka Phenomenon examines the social production of ageing in post-Soviet Russia, highlighting the role of grandmothers as primary caregivers due to men’s traditional estrangement from family life. This expectation places grandmothers, or babushkas, in a position where they prioritise childcare and housework over their careers, making them unpaid family carers reliant on the state and their children.

Anna Shadrina situates older Russian women’s experiences within the post-Soviet redefinition of the nation, analysing their portrayal in popular media and biographical narratives of women aged 60 and over in Russia and the UK. It addresses class and racial disparities, noting how some women outsource family duties to less qualified women, and emphasises age as a significant but overlooked axis of social inequality. From a feminist perspective, the book explores citizenship as both a status and a practice of inclusion and exclusion. By focusing on older women’s rights to participate in private and public spheres, it discusses the new social inequalities that emerged after the USSR’s collapse. Despite prioritising others’ interests, older Russian women actively engage in economic citizenship, though their struggles for recognition are often excluded from formal economy and politics.

Cold War Toys

Cold War Toys examines playthings manufactured, promoted and commercialised in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay during the second half of the twentieth century. Establishing connections and conversations with toys produced in earlier periods, including nineteenth-century dollhouses and building blocks created in the 1920s by Joaquín Torres-García, it goes on to analyse, among other items, scale-model household appliances distributed by the Eva Perón Foundation, construction sets made in 1970s Chile during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, and more recent figurines such as the Latin American versions of G.I. Joe and Latin Barbie dolls.

The book approaches toys as dispositifs – cultural formations that condense the discourses, institutions, architectural forms, scientific statements and philosophical propositions of Latin America’s Cold War. Drawing on a rich compendium of objects, many inspired by European or US brands, it shows how South American toys incorporated local characters, designs, messages and materials through a process of creative adaptation, thereby acquiring new identities. These and other original artefacts are examined variously as commodities from a once-flourishing industry, as works of art, originators of cultural myths and as training tools for Cold War childhoods. ’Toys are also seen as undervalued expressions of children’s material culture, imbued with the collective memory of a turbulent and contested era.

Men, Care and Well-being in Super-aged Japan

Men, Care and Well-being in Super-aged Japan offers an innovative perspective on social sustainability by examining men’s well-being through their involvement in caring for older family members. Focusing on super-aged Japan, the book provides a valuable way to understand key social challenges relevant to countries on the cusp of an ageing society. In contrast to the predominant focus on men in the workplace, this study shifts attention to men in the family – such as men as sons, sons-in-law, husbands and grandsons – whose roles in care remain understudied.

The first part explores men’s care relations in the context of their extended family relations, including the emergence of sons-in-law in care. The second part widens the perspective to include the domain of work and related policies to understand how men reconcile care and work. The third part situates men’s caregiving in the broader societal context, including attention to the author’s novel notion of ‘care literacy’. The structure provides specialists across relevant fields – such as well-being, masculinity, gender relations and care systems – greater flexibility in accessing relevant sections. Further, the design of parts and chapters supports the book’s use as teaching material in undergraduate and graduate courses.

Understanding China through Digital Anthropology

Understanding China through Digital Anthropology questions our understanding of digital technologies by demonstrating fundamental differences in the meaning of both technology and the digital between China and the West. This follows from a longstanding historical divergence in the meaning of and attitude to the relationship between technology and humanity.

The book also challenges our understanding of China through a series of case studies that range from the creation of algorithms, the normative basis of social media and the impact of digital communication on diverse fields including economic practices, gender, media and healthcare. These further demonstrate the value of long-term ethnographic studies that situate people’s online activities in their everyday offline lives. These case studies are testimony to the continued heterogeneity of China in covering sophisticated urban IT professionals, Tibetan villagers and grassroots women struggling to make a living. All of this contributes to a new understanding of a contemporary China that has been transformed by the sheer scale and dynamism manifested in the deployment of digital technologies. The book also includes an extensive summary of work undertaken by scholars inside China on digital anthropology and previously only available in Chinese.

Playing the Archive

Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the digital playground reflects on a major study inspired by the work of citizen scholar folklorists Iona and Peter Opie. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Opies built a vast collection of children’s street and playground games, stories, sayings, rhymes, beliefs and habits as told to them by children all over Britain. These accounts are now held in the Bodleian Libraries and were the focus and inspiration for the new study. New stories and games were gathered from today’s children, and comparisons drawn between play experiences at these two different points in time.

The book explores how the Opie Archive was made publicly available online by the project through digital images, innovative cataloguing and playful digital media interfaces, such as a red telephone kiosk at the Young V&A. Chapters analyse the ethnographic strands of the project, collecting evidence of new and old forms of play on today’s playgrounds using state-of-the-art digital methods. The book proposes new ways of thinking about changes and adaptations to play and games, theorising on the workings of interfaces, repertoires and archives. It also considers the Opies’ ways of working, landscapes of play over time, and intergenerational dialogue about play. The collection presents research evidence and theory which speak back to the often reductive public discourse around children’s play and digital media. It positions children as creative, agentive and engaged participants in their play cultures.