Bureaucracy, Integration and Suspicion in the Welfare State

Bureaucracy, Integration and Suspicion in the Welfare State PDF Author: Mark Graham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317299647
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This book explores how the often well-meaning routines and assumptions of a generous welfare state can reflect and even contribute to the stigmatisation of refugees and Muslims in Europe today. While the main cases are from Sweden, examples are included from the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. Mark Graham examines how suspicion is woven into the fabric of welfare bureaucracies with potential adverse consequences for the people they serve. He complicates our understanding of what Islamophobia means, and how it is expressed and created, by exploring contexts in which the logic of "othering" Muslims operates, but where explicit Islamophobia itself is absent. The book starts with Swedish public-sector bureaucracies and attempts by staff to make sense of Muslim refugee clients with categories and models that reappear in wider society. It goes on to explore the logic of integration policies, official concepts of culture, Swedish multiculturalism, educational strategies in schools, and debates surrounding "genuine" and "false" refugees. In all cases, the homologies between these different socio-cultural domains are explored.

Bureaucracy, Integration and Suspicion in the Welfare State

Bureaucracy, Integration and Suspicion in the Welfare State PDF Author: Mark Graham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317299647
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores how the often well-meaning routines and assumptions of a generous welfare state can reflect and even contribute to the stigmatisation of refugees and Muslims in Europe today. While the main cases are from Sweden, examples are included from the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. Mark Graham examines how suspicion is woven into the fabric of welfare bureaucracies with potential adverse consequences for the people they serve. He complicates our understanding of what Islamophobia means, and how it is expressed and created, by exploring contexts in which the logic of "othering" Muslims operates, but where explicit Islamophobia itself is absent. The book starts with Swedish public-sector bureaucracies and attempts by staff to make sense of Muslim refugee clients with categories and models that reappear in wider society. It goes on to explore the logic of integration policies, official concepts of culture, Swedish multiculturalism, educational strategies in schools, and debates surrounding "genuine" and "false" refugees. In all cases, the homologies between these different socio-cultural domains are explored.

The Biometric Border World

The Biometric Border World PDF Author: Karen Fog Olwig
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000713032
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Since the 1990s, biometric border control has attained key importance throughout Europe. Employing digital images of, for example, fingerprints, DNA, bones, faces or irises, biometric technologies use bodies to identify, categorize and regulate individuals’ cross-border movements. Based on innovative collaborative fieldwork, this book examines how biometrics are developed, put to use and negotiated in key European border sites. It analyses the disparate ways in which the technologies are applied, perceived and experienced by border control agents and others managing the cross-border flow of people, by scientists and developers engaged in making the technologies, and by migrants and non-government organizations attempting to manoeuvre in the complicated and often-unpredictable systems of technological control. Biometric technologies are promoted by national and supranational authorities and industry as scientifically exact and neutral methods of identification and verification, and as an infallible solution to security threats. The ethnographic case studies in this volume demonstrate, however, that the technologies are, in fact, characterized by considerable ambiguity and uncertainty and subject to substantial subjective interpretation, translation and brokering with different implications for migrants, border guards, researchers and other actors engaged in the border world.

Guatemalan Vigilantism and the Global (Re)Production of Collective Violence

Guatemalan Vigilantism and the Global (Re)Production of Collective Violence PDF Author: Gavin Weston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429575505
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book grounds an understanding of lynching as an increasingly globalised phenomenon through an examination of two cases in Guatemala. The chapters cover issues of migration, tourism, gangs, inter-generational conflict, media, gossip, and rumour to understand national and global patterns of mob-based vigilantism and how diverse factors are funnelled into singular acts of violence. Gavin Weston critically engages with the discussion of Guatemalan lynchings as a form of post-conflict violence alongside other less direct chains of causation. Lynchings have complex, tiered causations based in contestations regarding ideas and provision of justice. Underlying social problems and similarities in the way lynchings spread through talk and media make them relatively anticipatable in certain contexts and suggest possible spaces for mitigation against their viral spread. This volume will be relevant to Latin Americanists and those interested in the anthropology and sociology of violence, post-conflict violence, and peace studies.

Cultural Models of Nature

Cultural Models of Nature PDF Author: Giovanni Bennardo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351127888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Drawing on the ethnographic experience of the contributors, this volume explores the Cultural Models of Nature found in a range of food-producing communities located in climate-change affected areas. These Cultural Models represent specific organizations of the etic categories underlying the concept of Nature (i.e. plants, animals, the physical environment, the weather, humans, and the supernatural). The adoption of a common methodology across the research projects allows the drawing of meaningful cross-cultural comparisons between these communities. The research will be of interest to scholars and policymakers actively involved in research and solution-providing in the climate change arena.

Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary

Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary PDF Author: Christos Lynteris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000698882
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book develops an examination and critique of human extinction as a result of the ‘next pandemic’ and turns attention towards the role of pandemic catastrophe in the renegotiation of what it means to be human. Nested in debates in anthropology, philosophy, social theory and global health, the book argues that fear of and fascination with the ‘next pandemic’ stem not so much from an anticipation of a biological extinction of the human species, as from an expectation of the loss of mastery over human/non-humanl relations. Christos Lynteris employs the notion of the ‘pandemic imaginary’ in order to understand the way in which pandemic-borne human extinction refashions our understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The book challenges us to think how cosmological, aesthetic, ontological and political aspects of pandemic catastrophe are intertwined. The chapters examine the vital entanglement of epidemiological studies, popular culture, modes of scientific visualisation, and pandemic preparedness campaigns. This volume will be relevant for scholars and advanced students of anthropology as well as global health, and for many others interested in catastrophe, the ‘end of the world’ and the (post)apocalyptic.

Security Blurs

Security Blurs PDF Author: Tessa Diphoorn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351127365
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Security Blurs makes an important contribution to anthropological work on security. It introduces the notion of “security blurs” to analyse manifestations of security that are visible and identifi able, yet constructed and made up of a myriad and overlapping set of actors, roles, motivations, values, practices, ideas, materialities and power dynamics in their inception and performance. The chapters address the entanglements and overlaps between a variety of state and non-state security providers, from the police and the military to vigilantes, community organisations and private security companies. The contributors offer rich ethnographic studies of everyday security practices across a range of cultural contexts and reveal the impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. This book presents a new anthropological approach to security by explicitly addressing the overlap and entanglement of the practices and discourses of state and non-state security providers, and the associated forms of cooperation and confl ict that permit an analysis of these actors’ activities as increasingly “blurred”.

Slogans

Slogans PDF Author: Nicolette Makovicky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429942869
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Focusing on contexts of accelerated economic and political reform, this volume critically examines the role of slogans in the contemporary projects of populist mobilization, neoliberal governance, and civic subversion. Bringing together a collection of ethnographic studies from Greece, Slovakia, Poland, Abu Dhabi, Peru, and China, the contributors analyze the way in which slogans both convey and contest the values and norms that lie at the core of hegemonic political economic projects and ideologies.

The Bureaucrat and the Poor

The Bureaucrat and the Poor PDF Author: Professor Vincent Dubois
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409492605
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Welfare offices usually attract negative descriptions of bureaucracy with their queues, routines, and impersonal nature. Are they anonymous machines or the locus of neutral service relationships? Showing how people experience state public administration, The Bureaucrat and the Poor provides a realistic view of French welfare policies, institutions and reforms and, in doing so, dispels both of these myths. Combining Lipsky's street-level bureaucracy theory with the sociology of Bourdieu and Goffman, this research analyses face-to-face encounters and demonstrates the complex relationship between welfare agents, torn between their institutional role and their personal feelings, and welfare applicants, required to translate their personal experience into bureaucratic categories. Placing these interactions within the broader context of social structures and class, race and gender, the author unveils both the social determinations of these interpersonal relationships and their social functions. Increasing numbers of welfare applicants, coupled with mass unemployment, family transformations and the so-called 'integration problem' of migrants into French society deeply affect these encounters. Staff manage tense situations with no additional resources - some become personally involved, while others stick to their bureaucratic role; most of them alternate between involvement and detachment, assistance and domination. Welfare offices have become a place for 're-socialisation', where people can talk about their personal problems and ask for advice. On the other hand, bureaucratic encounters are increasingly violent, symbolically if not physically. More than ever, they are now a means of regulating the poor.

A Social History of Western Europe, 1880-1980

A Social History of Western Europe, 1880-1980 PDF Author: Hartmut Kaelble
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780717117246
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Arguing that the social integration of Western Europe already exists in an advanced form, Kaelble examines eight selected aspects of society: the European family; employment structures; big business; social mobility and education; social inequality in the class system; life in European cities; the rise of the welfare state; and industrial relations. Approaching a 'European history' rather than the traditional collection of national histories, his unique and challenging view of social development will interest not only historians but also sociologists and political scientists.

Modern Welfare States

Modern Welfare States PDF Author: Eric S. Einhorn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313056773
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Einhorn and Logue analyze the political, economic, and social challenges facing five small, affluent, and advanced industrial democracies in Scandinavia: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Updated and expanded from its successful predecessor, this edition emphasizes how global and European developments have affected democratic policymaking in areas such as: • Social welfare policy • Employment policy • Labor relations • Economic policy • Social change A comprehensive yet accessible survey of political history, governmental institutions, policymaking, political parties, interest groups, political culture, and foreign relations is also included. The comparative and interdisciplinary focus makes this a stimulating source of ideas for anyone interested in democracy and social justice in the global era.