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Developing a trilayer analysis of global, national and individual perspectives, this book examines ageing and the health and social care crisis. It begins with an examination of how broad structural and discursive trends, such as neoliberalism and globalisation, have influenced the financing and provision of health and social care for older people in Western countries including Germany, Sweden and the UK. It then goes onto discuss the impact that privatisation, ‘choice’ and competition has had on service provision, including how declining social protections have impacted upon employment practices. Three UK case studies (active ageing, pre-emergency, and end of life care) provide insight into individual’s (both older people and health care workers) experiences of navigating the risky, fragmented and complex health and social care system. Then the UK’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is compared with Sweden and Germany’s, and the UK government’s intended solutions to the health and social care crisis is discussed. Finally, the book ends by showcasing examples of innovative care solutions that have been trialled in the UK, and what broader cultural and political changes are necessary to provide a more sustainable and dignified health and social care system for older people.

The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers' efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But this book shows that the regulatory welfare state began a half century earlier, in the 1830s, with the passage of the first child labor laws. The book tells the story of how middle-class and elite reformers in Europe and the United States defined child labor as a threat to social order, and took the lead in bringing regulatory welfare into being. They built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks and instituted pathbreaking new employment protections. Later in the century, now with the help of organized labor, they created factory inspectorates to strengthen and routinize the state's capacity to intervene in industrial working conditions. The book compares seven in-depth case studies of key policy episodes in Germany, France, Belgium, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Foregrounding the agency of individual reformers, the book challenges existing explanations of welfare state development and advances a new pragmatist field theory of institutional change. In doing so, it moves beyond standard narratives of interests and institutions toward an integrated understanding of how these interact with political actors' ideas and coalition-building strategies.

Arousing Sense spotlights the senses and embodied knowledge for exploring the realm of creativity, experimentation, and knowledge making. The book is a collection of practiced-based explorations to arouse the senses, to “make sense” of how sensory experiences help to orient the body and self with others. No specialization needed! The purpose of the exercises is to stimulate creative activity by engaging with the senses, heighten sensory awareness, and deepen one’s understanding of what it is to be human. The exercises support workshop leaders and solo practitioners with straightforward instructions in cookbook recipe format, sometimes served with playfulness, performative drama, seriousness, or mystery to engage deeper, potentially sensitive issues. Heightening sensory awareness supports empathy and encourages compassion. Shifting one’s sensory point of view, communicating clearly, embracing open-mindedness, shedding assumptions, and inviting empathy and vulnerability into the explorations can enable revelations that what one experiences personally may not be the same as what others experience. The senses, as vehicles of transmission, serve as a means for understanding who we are in an embodied and situated sensibility. The recipes that can be delivered easily online are noted with an asterisk in the table of contents “Menu.”

From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have created a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This interdisciplinary volume explores the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by four groups of African Americans: artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and diasporic perspectives, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation.

Black women’s voices are infrequently theoretically centered in health literatures about how they experience and co-create their health, and it is even rarer for Black girls to be taken into account as reliable knowers. Black Women’s Health explores the real-life meanings and everyday practices of health (i.e., mental, physical, emotional, and sexual) for the African American mothers and daughters whose narratives comprise the research. The book draws from extensive fieldwork and focus groups conducted with African American mothers and their adolescent daughters ages 12–18 in North Carolina in their discussions about health, sexuality, intimacy, and transitions to “womanhood” in a variety of contexts. In this case, micro-theory draws on multiple concepts to reveal patterns of intergenerational health practices and communication. The methodological framework draws from a Black feminist and intersectional theoretical orientation to situate Black women’s and girls’ health. Black Women’s Health is thus the first scholarly book to treat the health status of African American mothers and daughters as integrally linked. Black Women’s Health probes the various ways in which African American mothers discuss vital issues with their daughters, and how their daughters co-construct, interpret, and resist maternal and cultural narratives of health, sexuality, and racial identity. These direct accounts highlight how African American women and girls navigate their health and intimate relationships, as well as the various health disparities rooted in the racism, sexism, and class marginality they experience.

Why do contemporary artists vary or maintain particular elements of their work? How do artists weigh these decisions at different career stages? Why do artists successfully garner money and prestige from some works but not others? Aesthetic judgments of contemporary art are highly uncertain. The book examines how artists make artistic decisions during the creative process and how others’ evaluations of artists’ work shape these creative processes. It draws upon ethnographic and interview data from the New York art world, encompassing a broad array of artists, dealers, curators, collectors, and art advisers. The book shows how artists and their audiences judge artworks not as discrete objects, but instead based on perceptions of each artist’s creative vision or distinctive style—the enduring and core elements within the body of work. Through experimentation, artists reproduce certain formal and conceptual elements, forming distinctive and recognizable bodies of work. As artists’ work travels to exhibitions and collections, viewers form their own, sometimes conflicting, interpretations of artists’ creative visions, in ways that can open or foreclose artists’ creative and career opportunities. The book reveals a paradox: ideas about what creativity is can ultimately impose constraints on the creative process.

This book attempts to determine the differences between working-class and middle-class cultures in the United States. The book's author writes as a now middle-class professional with a working-class upbringing, explaining the various ways the two cultures conflict and complement each other, illustrated by his own lived experiences. Set in a historical framework that reflects on how both class cultures developed, adapted, and survived through decades of historical circumstances, the book challenges professional middle-class views of both the working-class and themselves. In the end, the author argues for the creation of a cross-class coalition of what he calls “standard-issue professionals” with both hard-living and settled-living working people and outlines some policies that could help promote such a unification if the two groups had a better understanding of their differences and how to use those differences to their advantage. The book mixes personal stories and theoretical concepts to give us a compelling look inside the current complex position of the working-class in American culture and a view of what it could be in the future.

Building a Better Chicago explores the complex ecosystem of nonprofits within Chicago and highlights the tensions between formal nonprofits and informal grassroots organizations. As scholars of urban neighborhoods argue, such field-level analysis allows one to more fully understand how relationships between community members within the neighborhoods and external agencies and groups frame neighborhood dynamics. Throughout the text, the author analyzes how urban elites, nonprofit staff, and residents use interorganizational trust and mistrust to respond to large-scale redevelopment initiatives. As part of this, the author analyzes the New Communities Program, a ten-year, multimillion-dollar urban redevelopment initiative that was led by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national community development intermediary. Problematizing normative understandings of organizational trust and mistrust, the author examines the ways that Chicago’s poor Black and Mexican American communities leveraged collective skepticism as a tactical tool in order to ensure more equitable redevelopment occurred in their neighborhoods. Organizational trust is not always a positive force—rather, it can be co-opted as a mode of control, used to minimize dissent and to socialize members into a homogenous organizational culture. This book demonstrates how organizational mistrust, or collective skepticism, can yield a number of positive outcomes.

In 1933, Eugénie Brazier earned three Michelin stars for both of her restaurants—she was the first person to claim these high accolades and the only woman to ever do so. Brazier’s rise to fame helped establish Lyon’s place as the gastronomic capital of France, but it did not ensure that women would continue to lead the way in professional kitchens. Women are celebrated home cooks and guardians of French cuisine, but they have largely failed to achieve the same recognition for their craft in the professional kitchen. The small number of women who have succeeded in the culinary arts are celebrated as exceptions. This book looks at the historical and contemporary reasons for the underrepresentation of women in culinary professions in France, a country where cuisine is considered an important cultural form. It considers the strategies that women use to enter and move ahead in what is often a hostile work environment where gender inequality persists. The author explores the realities of women who cook professionally through their own culinary education and apprenticeship as well as extensive interviews with female and male cooks, chefs, and journalists. Lyon serves as a rich field site for discovering women’s resilience, skill and challenges as they seek to make their mark in the culinary arts.

Chicago is confronting a racial reckoning that we explain with an exclusion-containment theory of legal cynicism. Mayors RJ and RM Daley used public and private funds to exclude and contain South and West Side predominantly Black neighborhoods where Police Detective Jon Burge supervised torture of over 100 Black men. A 1982 case involved Andrew Wilson’s tortured confession to two police killings. This case coincided with RM Daley’s pursuit of White votes in an early and unsuccessful primary campaign for mayor. Suspicions about Daley’s connection to Wilson’s confession lasted throughout his career. As state’s attorney, Daley mobilized a massive assault on “gangs, guns, and drugs” by tightening law enforcement methods. An example involved the Automatic Transfer Act used to prosecute 15-year-old Joseph White in adult court for shooting a fellow student. The judge thought White should have sought help from police, but White and his family knew the police as brutal occupiers of local neighborhoods. Joseph White was sentenced to 45 years in a maximum-security prison. Jon Burge was finally convicted in 2010—of perjury—but he served only three years, while many of his victims remained on death row. In a sidebar in the Burge trial—unheard by jurors—the judge refused to allow evidence about a racialized code of silence that concealed Burge’s torture. Our book ends by explaining how Daley and Burge escaped meaningful punishment through the code of silence and out-of-court settlements. These remain unrelenting sources of the racial reckoning confronting this quintessential American city.

This book explores Chinese young men’s views of manhood and how they construct and negotiate masculinities in everyday lives. Drawing from empirical research, it uses the term shenti (body-self) as a central concept to investigate the Chinese male body and explores masculinity within intimacy and kinship. The book proposes and develops a new concept of ‘elastic masculinity’ which can be stretched and forged differently depending on the context. At the same time, the men’s masculinity formation is constrained by the availability of resources, structural constraints, cultural traditions and diverse personal relationships. The book showcases how Chinese masculinities reflect the resilience of Confucian notions as well as transnational ideas of modern manhood. By doing so, it prioritizes local knowledge while setting the scene in a global framework. The book provides a unique dialogue with ‘western’ discourse on masculinity, and a timely study of how ordinary men actively engage with China’s global modernity, increasing individualisation, shifting gender values and changing local realities.

In the United States, more than seven million people claim to be multiracial, or have racially mixed heritage, parentage, or ancestry. In The Colors of Love, Melinda A. Mills explores how multiracial people navigate their complex—and often misunderstood—identities in romantic relationships. Drawing on sixty interviews with multiracial people in interracial relationships, Mills explores how people define and assert their racial identities both on their own and with their partners. She shows us how similarities and differences in identity, skin color, and racial composition shape how multiracial people choose, experience, and navigate love. Mills highlights the unexpected ways in which multiracial individuals choose to both support and subvert the borders of race as individuals and as romantic partners. The Colors of Love broadens our understanding about race and love in the twenty-first century.

A considerable amount of attention and money has been spent on programs aimed to improve the technical skills of girls of color. The impact of such efforts is not clearly understood. This book illustrates how one of the first technology programs for girls of color, COMPUGIRLS, shaped and is shaped by its adolescent participants. As a series of narratives exemplifying how intersectionality is more than a theory of multiple identities and resilience, the African American, Latina, and Native American stars of this book challenge many of the taken-for-granted ideas of girlhoods in this digital age. Navigating a program that emphasizes both technical and “power skills,” the stories reveal how culturally responsive computing practices succeed and, in some instances, fail to prepare the next generation to become the techno-social agents our society requires. To this end, the book challenges broad audiences to recognize and embrace the uniqueness of girlhoods of color theoretically and programmatically.

The premise of the book is that building and construction practices are insensitive to the needs of many people, and implicated in the widespread despoliation and degradation of ecological systems and the environment. From the construction of transport networks and major commercial and residential property in rapidly urbanising countries, to the popularisation of self-build and home improvements, we are living in a period of incessant and unprecedented building. Few places are untouched by construction and infrastructure projects that are part of an ideology of building that has little regard to what is needed and, instead, are shaped by political and economic values that regard building and construction as ‘a good thing’. Using examples from around the world, the book identifies the mentalities of construction and building that are failing people and places in many different ways, and calls for radical changes to city living and environments by building less, but better.

Who makes decisions that shape the housing, policies, and social programs in urban neighborhoods? Who, in other words, governs? This book offers a rich ethnographic portrait of the individuals who implement community development projects in the Fairmount Corridor, one of Boston's poorest areas. The book uncovers a network of nonprofits and philanthropic foundations making governance decisions alongside public officials—a public–private structure that has implications for democratic representation and neighborhood inequality. The book's author spent four years following key players in Boston's community development field. While state senators and city councilors are often the public face of new projects, and residents seem empowered through opportunities to participate in public meetings, the author found a shadow government of nonprofit leaders and philanthropic funders, nonelected neighborhood representatives with their own particular objectives, working behind the scenes. Tying this system together were political performances of “community”—government and nonprofit leaders, all claiming to value the community. The author argues that there is no such thing as a singular community voice, meaning any claim of community representation is, by definition, illusory. The author shows how community development is as much about constructing the idea of community as it is about the construction of physical buildings in poor neighborhoods. The book demonstrates how the nonprofit sector has become integral to urban policymaking, and the tensions and trade-offs that emerge when private nonprofits take on the work of public service provision.

The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enclosure of Indigenous land and extraction of Indigenous resources, and settler colonialism as a technique of racial capitalism. Drawing upon the literature and historiography of the so-called Black Hawk War, it looks to the colonization of the upper Mississippi River lead region as one instance of primitive accumulation for purposes of mineral accretion. While conventional histories of the Black Hawk War have treated the conflict as gratuitous and tragic, The Corpse in the Kitchen argues that the conflict between Black Hawk, settler militias, and the federal military were part of a struggle over the dispensation of mineral resources, specifically, mineral lead. The elemental basis for the fabrication of bullets, the federal state had a vested interest in control over regional lead resources, as a means of manufacturing the implements by which it would secure its sovereignty over North America. As the basis for metallic type, the abundance of lead drawn from the mines of the upper Mississippi would also occasion an expansion of printing, creating new technologies of memory and forgetting. The Corpse in the Kitchen explores the intimacies between extraction and killing, writing, printing, memory, and forgetting, a story of settlers as rapacious consumers of Indigenous peoples.

Over the last twenty years, a resurgence of craft food industries occurred across the U.S. Drawing on consumers’ desire for slow/local food craft breweries, traditional butchers, cheesemongers, and bakeries have been popping up in across the United States. These industries are typically found in major urban areas, staffed by middle class, college educated, often white men and sometimes women who view working in these industries as part of an alternative lifestyle existing in opposition to the mainstream emphasis of industrial consumption. Yet this emphasis on urban craft industries obscures the complex reality behind the craft food movement and the diverse communities that have supported craft and artisanal foods for centuries. Across the Southern U.S. these slow and local foods are a traditional part of daily life, and their continued practice sits at the intersection of financial sustenance, knowledge, and art. Exploring a variety of Southern artisanal foods from Virginia wineries to shrimping in coastal communities and Mississippi tamales, the producers of these foods show how traditional, not necessarily “new” these movements are within the region and the U.S. as a whole. Arguably, it is the diversity of who is central to these products and foodways that render it and the related history invisible to most U.S. consumers.

As media consumption in modern society has expanded, along with the number of outlets by which individuals consume media, there is an ever-growing body of popular television shows that underscore ideas related to criminological theory as well as the criminal justice system. Crime TV provides an examination of criminological theory as well as the criminal justice system as manifested in popular television shows. The contributions to the volume approach these issues from a variety of angles. Some center on classical, positivist, and social structural theories such as techniques of neutralization, labeling theory, and social bonds, using shows including Archer, Criminal Minds, 13 Reasons Why, Breaking Bad, and The Fall. Others highlight critical and cultural criminological frameworks such as radical feminism and conflict theory through shows including The Walking Dead, Mr. Robot, Homeland, The Defenders, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and The Handmaid’s Tale. Finally, several address the criminal justice system and crime through shows including Game of Thrones, American Crime, Westworld, Black Mirror, and Follow the Money. The specific benefits of the current volume are multifaceted. First, it can be used as a pedagogical tool to attract students to criminological theory and the criminal justice system. Second, as a significant proportion of students have access to streaming services, the shows exemplified in the text are generally accessible to them. Third, the volume highlights information pertaining to the criminal justice system and criminological theory commonly misconstrued in pop culture.

Criminal Justice is popularly conceptualised as a pursuit of the truth. This book considers the extent to which this view reflects reality by exploring a number of key themes. The ‘pursuit of truth’ suggests an obtainable, single truth and the book considers the extent to which truth is a far more complex, nuanced phenomenon. Often the criminal process appears to be more about constructing a narrative and telling a convincing story. The book explores the extent to which a pursuit of truth can conflict with other values such as justice and the protection of human rights, with particular focus on illegally obtained evidence and confessions. The concluding chapters discuss the extent to which the pursuit of truth has shaped the modern trial process and assesses alternative approaches to criminal justice including restorative justice and truth commissions. The conclusion highlights some fundamental themes in the book and points to the limitations of the current criminal justice system not only in terms of establishing truth but in terms of realising significant social benefit. Three areas of focus are taken to assess the current system’s ability to find the truth: blame, juvenile justice, and the pursuit of justice. The book argues that the current criminal process adopts a person, rather than a system, approach to bad events with a focus on identifying individuals to blame rather than addressing the wider problems resulting from crime.

Focusing on the Criminalisation of Social Policy, this book explores the intersections between crime and social policy and the ways in which contemporary social policies in many different countries look more like crime control policies. From anti-immigration agendas, which criminalise vulnerable populations, to the punishment of the poor and the governance of parenting, the book engages with the ways in which certain constituencies in our societies, who need help and support, are made to feel criminal in their relationships with the state and its agents. Specific policy examples chosen from across countries show that the criminalisation of social policy has resonance internationally. These are selected from the fields of work and welfare; borders and citizenship; family policy, urban planning and offender reintegration. In illuminating intersecting, and at times very troubling policy interventions, the book wrestles with ideas as to what social policy and welfare states should look like in our societies. It incites the reader to continue this process so that we reclaim the best of the ‘social’ in social policy for the twenty-first century.