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Bill Brydon

Deliberative multiculturalism in New Labour's Britain - Citizenship Studies - 0 views

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    The aim of this paper is to examine the principles that New Labour has employed in its citizenship and multicultural policies in Britain, and to clarify theoretical locations as well as philosophical rationales of those principles. By deliberative multiculturalism, I mean a set of policies and discourses of New Labour about citizenship and multicultural issues, which emphasizes rational dialogue and mutual respect with firmly guaranteed political rights especially for minorities. New Labour tries to go beyond liberal and republican citizenship practice through enhancing deliberation, the origin of which goes back to the British tradition of parliamentary sovereignty. It also attempts to achieve a one-nation out of cultural cleavages, shifting its focus from redistribution with social rights to multicultural deliberation with political rights. I organize my discussion with a focus on the difference between two theoretical concepts: the relationship between cultural rights and individual equality, and the relationship between national boundaries and global belonging. In the concluding section, I explain three positive developments of New Labour's approach and also four limitations it has faced.
Bill Brydon

Bodies and Accumulation: Revisiting Labour in the 'Production of Nature' - New Politica... - 0 views

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    This commentary on Neil Smith's Uneven Development revisits his production of nature thesis and uses it as a jumping off point to explore how human bodies matter in contemporary capitalism. It argues that human bodies are increasingly subsumed within capitalism in ways that go beyond the roles of humans as labourers and purchasers of goods and services in a system of commodities producing commodities. Bodies are also treated as property, transportation and as conditions of production within circuits of capitalisms. Bodies also absorb the externalities and excesses of production and provide new spaces of accumulation in their degradation.
Bill Brydon

The Meaning of Work in Neoliberal Globalisation: the Asian exception? - Third World Qua... - 0 views

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    "This article argues that a central element of capitalist development, especially in its neo-liberal form, has been the configuration of a rationalised and individuated conception of work that helps to maximise capitalist efficiency. As the capitalist system has become globalised there has been an attempt to export this conception of work to the Global South by means of liberalisation programmes, many of them sponsored by the World Bank. These have entailed repression of organised labour in the attempt to force workers to adopt the role allocated to them by neo-liberalism, that of individual rational maximisers of utilities. It is argued that this attempt to globalise a neo-liberal conception of work must confront an Asia wherein local values (notably a preference for communitarian rather than individualistic values) and conditions have led both state and civil society to frame the concept of work as having collective rather than just individual significance."
Bill Brydon

Migration and ethnic nationalism: Anglophone exit and the 'decolonisation' of... - 0 views

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    "This article explains the effects of ethnic nationalism on Anglophone and Francophone migration. The rise of Québec ethnic nationalism in the 1960s dismantled the cultural division of labour, which created new opportunities for Francophones but threatened Anglophones' traditional dominance over the Québec economy. This had negative consequences for Anglophones but positive outcomes for Francophones, which in turn accounts for differences in migration patterns. Drawing from the internal colony model as well as migration and exit-voice theories, and using ecological census data, micro-census data and election panel data, I find that the key variables that increase the likelihood of Anglophone out-migration either do not explain Francophone out-migration or have opposite effects. This is because ethnonationalist policies decreased the economic return particularly for well-educated, higher-earning, professional Anglophones in Québec, while increasing the economic position of Francophones and in particular well-educated professionals."
Bill Brydon

Nancy Fraser: On Justice New Left Review - 0 views

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    "Justice occupies a special place in the pantheon of virtues. For the ancients, it was often conceived as the master virtue, the one that orders all the others. For Plato, justice had exactly this overarching status. A just individual, he tells us in The Republic, is one in whom the three parts of the soul-reason, spirit, appetite-and the three virtues associated with them-wisdom, courage, moderation-stand in the right relation to one another. Justice in the city is precisely analogous. In the just city, each class exercises its own distinctive virtue by performing the task suitable for its nature, and none interferes with the others. The wise and rational part does the ruling, the brave and spirited part does the soldiering, and the rest, those lacking special spirit or intelligence but capable of moderation, do the farming and the manual labouring. Justice is the harmonious balance among these constituent elements."
Bill Brydon

CONVERGENCE CULTURE AND THE LEGACY OF FEMINIST CULTURAL STUDIES - Cultural Studies - Vo... - 0 views

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    This essay elaborates upon some of the feminist legacies underwriting the work of Henry Jenkins, particularly the 2006 book, Convergence Culture, to develop a set of priorities for media and Cultural Studies research following in its wake. Focusing on critical uses of the term 'subculture', and its convenient fit with Internet scholarship to date, and moving to an analysis of the notion of 'participatory culture', we question how easily the practices of online media consumption can be separated from the wider structuring conditions of everyday life. Our recent research on fan communities and information workers highlights the labour and leisure conditions contributing to the experience of online community, fan-based or otherwise. These contrasting examples show the many non-voluntary dimensions that accompany participation in 'convergence culture', and how these are experienced in specific ways. The gendered intimacy of fan fiction communities and the coercive nature of technologically mediated white collar employment each reveal the stakes involved in allowing the practices of a minority to stand as the optimistic vision of the imminent media landscape.
Bill Brydon

Labour, New Social Movements and the Resistance to Neoliberal Restructuring in Europe -... - 0 views

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    The purpose of this article is to analyse one of the very first European-level instances of trade union and social movement interaction in defence of the public sector, namely, the Coalition for Green and Social Procurement, an alliance of European trade unions and green and social non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and its campaign for an amendment of the new public procurement directives from 2000 to 2003. It will be examined to what extent this campaign was able to change the directives and counter neoliberal restructuring effectively as well as what the possibilities but also limits of trade union and social movement cooperation are as exemplified in this particular case study.
Bill Brydon

Legitimacy and globalization - 0 views

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    The financial crisis which recently occurred is the epiphenomenon of a structural crisis of advanced capitalism. Although it referred to a very different context the diagnosis made by Habermas in his work Legitimationsprobleme des Spätkapitalismus, published in 1973, remains a very useful key in order to understand the irreducibility of social policy and the way the post-Fordist capitalism assumes the mediation between the economic and the social sphere - that is, how it deals with both the deficit of rationality and the deficit of legitimacy. Instead of being the political expression of social relations the neo-liberal system decouples labour and capital and, governed by financial markets, disconnects the social and the political rights and undermines the possibility of a true foundation of citizenship. In other words, the 'refeudalization' Habermas had reported as early as in Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (1962) remains quite topical.
Bill Brydon

International Studies in Gender, State and Society - The Agency Gap in Work-Life Balanc... - 0 views

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    "Work-life balance (hereafter WLB) is a discursive refrain in European public debate that reflects goals for a more productive workforce: that women and men should be able to be both earners and carers. It is not merely a buzzword in policy circles, however, but mirrors rising expectations of working parents for a better quality of life and the tensions that ensue from these expectations within individual lives, households, work organizations, and policy frameworks. European societies' attitudinal studies reveal that an overwhelming majority of both women and men maintain that WLB is a primary priority when considering job and workplace (Hobson and Fahlén 2009a, 2009b). There is also convincing evidence that most European men would like to reduce their working hours, even with an equivalent reduction in hourly pay (Fagan 2004; Hobson and Fahlén 2009a). Yet, there is a growing gap between attitudes and practices, the ideal and the real, as seen in the rising numbers of individuals who work long hours (Boulin et al. 2006; Guest 2002; Lee 2004), and the significant proportions of jobs with unsocial hours (Boulin et al. 2006; Perrons et al. 2006). When applied to working parents, WLB is often defined as a lack thereof, i.e., work-life imbalance, or work-life conflict (Guest 2002), which is reflected in international research that shows that individuals most often view work demands as impinging on family time rather than vice versa (Frone 2003)."
Bill Brydon

Hailing the Twelve Million: U.S. Immigration Policy, Deportation, and the Imaginary of ... - 0 views

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    This essay argues that the failures of U.S. immigration enforcement institutions functioned as a strategic policy from 2003 to 2010, when the undocumented population in the United States reached an unprecedented twelve million people. The author examines how the so-called broken immigration system installed a repressive form of governmentality based in failure. While deferring any legalization, federal and state authorities fostered a regime of exclusion and removal that constituted a class of minimal subjects, those of unauthorized migrants and their kin who would effectively exist outside the community of rights. During this period, immigration arrests and deportations reached unprecedented levels, at a moment when the majority of the undocumented remained an irredeemably criminalized status. By disavowing any intention to conduct mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents gained sanction for more targeted campaigns of militarized raids, racial profiling, and detentions. The author argues that heightened enforcement, including the 287g program, created dangerous opportunities for government agents to suspend basic democratic restraints on state power, often for interests of racial and class antagonism that exceeded the bounds of immigration enforcement-with severe consequences for Latino communities. By mobilizing a social imaginary predicated on the necessity of uprooting the undocumented, federal, state, and local officials committed themselves to the actions of a police state and sanctioned a system of apartheid governance within the boundaries of the United States.
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