Search Results

This chapter focuses on social assistance recipients’ evolving views on the fairness of being summoned to do volunteer work by Dutch local authorities. This ‘workfare volunteering’ is often considered the best alternative to – but also route towards – paid employment. Building on Nancy Fraser’s work on recognition and redistribution as well as Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘worlds of justification’ framework, this chapter reveals how social assistance recipients’ perceptions of ‘workfare volunteering’ change over the course of their involvement as volunteers. While many social assistance recipients initially judged the obligation to do volunteer work as unfair, the meaning many found in their voluntary positions reversed their initial judgements. But over time – especially as the lack of sustained guidance left them as far away from the paid labour market as ever – they came to see workfare volunteering as deeply unfair. The chapter aims to further our theoretical and empirical understanding of social justice from the perspective of the subjects of welfare-to-work policies.

Focusing on Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow, the chapter explores the familiar forms of dehumanization invoked to reinforce the inherent othering of the rival nation, as well as how Hollywood interpolates the ostensibly progressive image of the self-reliant female action hero in working to shore up perceptions of institutions such as the CIA (with its long and ongoing record of collusion with some of the most reactionary militant and political groups across the globe). The chapter examines these two films within the context of the broader resurgence of Cold War imagery and ideology in contemporary Hollywood.

This chapter examines the marginalising effects of institutional practices of ascribing social difference in patient case records, and it takes non-white patients as its main subject. In addition, it revisits the focus on mobility by looking closely at the ways that some members of the colonial institutional population were confined through their own vulnerability to policing and regulation, their social identities signalling disorder in the colonial world. Indigenous peoples, Chinese, the so-called ‘half-caste’ inmates, and other fine calibrations of ethnic identities inside the institutions are all discussed here. This chapter also returns to the contemporary medical preoccupation with the health of white subjects by examining the colonial-born, or ‘hybrid’ populations of the insane.

This introduction outlines the volume’s aim to produce conversations across disciplines, something that rarely occurs in Homelessness Studies. It describes the chapters in the volume, outlining how they examine the processes of Othering and dehumanisation, as well as discussing the advantages of co-production. It also outlines the stereotypical representations that are prevalent in discussions of homelessness. These representations, which are often found in charity publicity campaigns, focus on ‘rough sleepers’ as passive victims. While some scholars have argued in favour of stereotyping on the grounds that it is effective in securing charitable donations, this introduction argues that such representations cause significant damage by perpetuating harmful myths. The introduction asserts the need for a shift in representation towards demonstrating the agency and abilities of people with experience of homelessness. It then explains the benefits of including self-representations by contributors with experience of homelessness alongside academic research.

From a social psychological perspective, the media plays an important role in both reflecting existing ideas and understanding of issues within society and influencing and developing those ideas. This may be of particular relevance at times of controversy, when meanings become foregrounded and contested. Existing studies suggest that the British media has always been fertile ground for discussions of homelessness, with a long history of binary presentations based on deserving/undeserving, acceptable/unacceptable and so on. Otherness and criminality are strong themes throughout, as is a significant seasonal focus to particular stories. This chapter details a recent study examining all articles that appeared in six British newspapers in May and November 2018. The newspapers were chosen to represent both tabloid and broadsheet and left- and right-wing perspectives. Unlike many previous studies, results suggested a concern with the broader structural issues involved in homelessness rather than an over-emphasis on individual stories. However, on a more implicit level, continued associations with crime and with immigration suggested that the ‘Otherness’ of homelessness was maintained in many of these articles. This ‘Otherness’ was developed through comparison with the charitable, socially acceptable self.

In this chapter, the focus turns to explore how the policy impacted on participants’ perceptions of fairness and justice in social housing allocation. This is set within the context of existing debates about the racialisation of social housing, a result of struggles over who should have preference to access this declining resource. While those tensions are played out at the local level, the rhetoric around social housing has increasingly linked this form of tenure with ‘welfare dependency’. The chapter begins by exploring how participants evaluate austerity politics in terms of their own economic position. It then turns to focus on their status and social positioning and how the policy raises questions of worth and value. What we see here are not just struggles over material resources such as housing, but also over less tangible psychosocial and symbolic resources that afford people a sense of worth and value.

Beyond the statistics that tend to dominate much public debate, a focus on the experience of poverty, drawing on psychosocial analysis, reveals its relational as well as material nature. The article explores this understanding of poverty with reference to the impact of the discourses that shame and Other ‘the poor’ who ‘count for nothing’. It argues for acknowledgement of the agency of people who live with poverty and the structural constraints and insecurity within which it is exercised. This, together with a human rights perspective, premised on a belief in human dignity, can help to frame counter-discourses of recognition and respect. The article ends with some brief reflections on implications for policy and the politics of poverty.

This chapter focuses on life in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, where experiences of social exclusion and 'Othering' have increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It refers to a combination of extreme health challenges, crowding, and a dramatic loss of economic livelihoods that were caused by restrictions placed on interactions between those in the refugee camp and those outside. It also recounts health experts that warned that if the virus reached the world's largest refugee camp, it would spread like wildfire and Bangladesh might become devastated by COVID-19 due to the arrangements of camp settlements. The chapter points out that the population density in the Rohingya camp is more than 100,000 people per square mile and sanitation options are scarce. It mentions the groceries, kiosks, health centers, and schools that are all located within the camps, making congestion worse.

This chapter analyses the microlevel of an individuals' processing of migratory experiences and explores the particularities and exemptions in the overall appropriation, rejection, and Othering of Arabness. It highlights two special cases, namely Javanese labor migrants' rejection of Arabness in favor of East Asian styles and Madurese peoples' vivid localizations of Arabness. It also looks at disparities and local features that reveal changes in Islamic lifestyles that cannot be generalized in a culturally heterogeneous country like Indonesia. The chapter refers to the ambivalence of Indonesian engagements with the Arab world. It unravels the question of why migrants and pilgrims in Madura and in Central Java follow different guiding narratives.

This chapter shows how, by combining European Gothic traditions and elements of Indigenous belief systems, Australian Aboriginal artists reclaim their own cultural heritage and reject the coloniser’s construction of Aboriginal people as the demonised Other. Aboriginal Gothic texts such as Her Sister’s Eye (2002) and ‘The Little Red Man’ (2011) defy their European predecessors’ traditional and stereotypical cast as well as their commodification of Indigenous culture, thus creating a counter-discourse to the master-discourse of European Gothic. This challenge, however, takes place within the plots and in the mode of transmission itself. Therefore, Aboriginal Gothic in the twenty-first century is not limited to the written word, but includes other forms like films, such as Karroyul (2015), and interactive media, such as Warwick Thorton’sThe Otherside Project (2014). In this way, the Gothic’s shape as a literary mode, as opposed to Indigenous oral traditions, is questioned just as much as its history of Othering.

The British vote to leave the EU is frequently explained with reference to the effects of immigration, the rise of populism, the country’s imperial past, memories of the Second World War, its attachment to parliamentary democracy, and its special relationship with the United States. Relevant as all these issues are, to fully understand Brexit it is also necessary to pay attention to the strong cultural forces that have driven the vote to leave. To put it simply, many people in Britain are literally Eurosceptic in the sense that they do not feel European, but instead see Europe and ‘the Europeans’ as the Other. Chiefly drawing on literature, and connecting the discourse of traditional anti-Catholicism with contemporary anti-Europeanism, this chapter explores the origins, nature and consequences of British cultural exceptionalism.

This chapter discusses The Aachen Memorandum (AM) (1995) by historian Andrew Roberts as a paradigmatic example of one important branch of Eurosceptic novels. It analyses the novel as a dystopian narrative that depicts the European Union as a dys-EUtopia, set in a future where Britain has become an undesirable and unpleasant place that shares salient features with the dystopian societies of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World. The chapter argues that Robert’s influential novel takes an extremely Eurosceptic perspective, extrapolating the EU’s integration efforts and policies into a totalitarian means of control through constant surveillance, propaganda or the re-writing of history. The chapter illustrates how the Eurosceptic novel actively promotes national identity and sovereignty, drawing upon a storehouse of Eurosceptic tropes and repeating a certain nationalist version of British history that sets Britain against a EUropean Other. Expressing and disseminating widespread Eurosceptic fears, Roberts’s novel thus anticipates Brexit.

This chapter argues that the European migration crisis just provided more ground for nationalist populist politics of the Fidesz government of Hungary. Using a systematic content analysis of the official speeches of the PM Viktor Orbán since 2010, the chapter shows this new conception of national identity mobilizes against the collapse of traditional national values as well as the liberal rationalism embodied by EU institutions and puts Hungarian nationals above all others. In this setting, the discursive construction and use of ‘otherness’ in public discourse stand for the representations of migrants as a deviant groups of people, enemies of the Hungarian nation, of a threatening ideology/religion that must be opposed. Citizenship is hijacked as a civilizational/cultural marker to distinguish ‘us’ from the ‘other’. Europe and its common governance systems, secular organization, religious tolerance, and liberal foundation only exacerbate this threat, making the EU become ‘the other’, against what the national identity must be protected.

The second chapter of Part One is based on an analysis of the rhetorical aspects of a case study written by a social worker for a group supervision. It covers ideas regarding the politics of representation and exemplifies how awareness of the power of professional writing can change a written case study through the presentation of three versions of the same case study. In addition to contributing to social workers who wish to gain insight into this aspect of their work, the chapter is suitable for teaching purposes.

The third chapter of Part Four of the book tells the story of a social worker who came to an apartment following a complaint from the neighbours that young children had been left there on their own only to discover that the apartment was flooded with sewage. The response of the social worker is analysed as an example of a ‘standing against’ position. The possibility of standing by is presented in the chapter as a tentative choice.

This chapter examines how the discourse surrounding immigration influenced the ways in which citizenship and belonging could be imagined for Latinos in central Indiana. More specifically, it considers the impact of policing of who belonged to the community for both Latinos and non-Latinos in Lafayette. It shows that undocumented residents were barred from acceptance and denied citizenship because they were an Other form of being, an Other form of residing, an Other form of existence that challenged the popularized notions of equality in the United States. It also explores the basis of this Othering, the notion of illegality, within the context of immigration and how belonging was imagined through a limited conceptualization of community.