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citizenship and labour, and some have indicated the bias pertinent to labour studies of interpreting citizenship claims as labour claims (Steadman-Jones, 1983 ; Somers, 2008, 1996 ). Indeed, the fieldwork above reveals a surprisingly close relationship between the notions of labour activism and activist citizenship. While labour- or class-based solidarity emerged as an important factor for many of the NGOs in this chapter, they also emphasise the importance of rights to voice, recognition and representation, all of which, while taking labour as a
transactions have produced common understandings of how to act. The organised values, norms, beliefs and attitudes of other actors inform the ‘habitual’, communicatively transmitted through the ‘generalised other’ and significant symbols that are recognised by both the conveyer and responder, such as in the recognition between actors of the critical values and related actions associated with a particular political party (see also Cutchin, this volume). They reflect common understandings among a group of social actors, although such processes are also dynamic in nature and
‘anonymous’. 2 My proposal to focus on Rancière’s theory of subjectification (and disidentification) as opposed to identity politics or justice as recognition aims at expanding understandings about the role of subject positions in social struggles and movements. Specifically, I am looking at the limits of existing classifications such as ‘food sovereignty’ or ‘peasant rights
Manchester Cathedral has major examples of stained glass from the post-war period, following loss and damage of medieval and later glass, most recently during the Second World War and after the 1996 IRA bomb. Margaret Traherne’s Fire Window memorialises the Manchester Blitz, evoking both fire and the blood of sacrifice. A later scheme by Tony Hollaway fills windows in the west end of the building. This major artistic achievement explores the journey from Creation to Revelation, with reference to the cathedral’s connections and patron saints. These works deserve wider recognition and are major examples of twentieth-century art in the city.
Manchester: Something rich and strange challenges us to see the quintessential post-industrial city in new ways. Bringing together twenty-three diverse writers and a wide range of photographs of Greater Manchester, it argues that how we see the city can have a powerful effect on its future – an urgent question given how quickly the urban core is being transformed. The book uses sixty different words to speak about the diversity of what we think of as Manchester – whether the chimneys of its old mills, the cobbles mostly hidden under the tarmac, the passages between terraces, or the everyday act of washing clothes in a laundrette. Unashamedly down to earth in its focus, this book makes the case for a renewed imaginative relationship that recognises and champions the fact that we’re all active in the making and unmaking of urban spaces.
This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.
As the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 has slowly revealed a shadowy background of outsourcing and deregulation, and a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. Safe as Houses weaves together Stuart’s research over the last decade with residents’ groups in council regeneration projects across London to provide the first comprehensive account of how Grenfell happened and how it could easily have happened in multiple locations across the country. It draws on examples of unsafe housing either refurbished or built by private companies under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to show both the terrible human consequences of outsourcing and deregulation and how the PFI has enabled developers, banks and investors to profiteer from highly lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. The book also provides shocking testimonies of how councils and other public bodies have continuously sided with their private partners, doing everything in their power to ignore, deflect and even silence those who speak out. The book concludes that the only way to end the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision is to end the disastrous regime of self-regulation. This means strengthening safety laws, creating new enforcement agencies independent of government and industry, and replacing PFI and similar models of outsourcing with a new model of public housing that treats the provision of shelter as ‘a social service’ democratically accountable to its residents.
No struggle for social justice that lacks a grounded understanding of how wealth is accumulated within society, and by whom, is ever likely to make more than a marginal dent in the status quo. Much work has been done over the years by academics and activists to illuminate the broad processes of wealth extraction. But a constantly watchful eye is essential if new forms of financial extraction are to be blocked, short-circuited, deflected or unsettled. So when the World Bank and other well-known enablers of wealth extraction start to organise to promote greater private-sector involvement in ‘infrastructure’, for example through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), alarm bells should start to ring. How are roads, bridges, hospitals, ports and railways being eyed up by finance? What bevels and polishes the lens through which they are viewed? How is infrastructure being transformed into an ‘asset class’ that will yield the returns now demanded by investors? Why now? What does the reconfiguration of infrastructure tell us about the vulnerabilities of capital? The challenge is not only to understand the mechanisms through which infrastructure is being reconfigured to extract wealth: equally important is to think through how activists might best respond. What oppositional strategies genuinely unsettle elite power instead of making it stronger?
thorn, Atlantic gale and storm Limestone, stone by stone Advancing to delay To the last angle and oval With makeshift-erratic Punctuation of granite Relief work in stark relief – As now at home recalling I step up from Cill Rónáin Over the top and down To Gort na gCapall (a.k.a. West Cork) The field of the horse On my solitary walk Unpicking as I go The old formula: Distance over speed and time – Beyond recognition In my mind-body economy Of presences and memory In and out of step Balancing line on line Not carelessly picked Or casually piled But as those men worked With steady
region’s archaeology by figures such as Haworth, inspired by Amelia Edward’s 1877 book A Thousand Miles up the Nile. It is this problematic history that suggests the collection is not just a world-leading space for Egyptology, but a historical artefact of imperial violence and its aftermath. It is a reminder of the ways that colonialism lives on in Manchester in forms that demand urgent public debate, and a recognition of the underlying brute force unleashed in the making of Cottonopolis and its prized cultural institutions. We must consider the collection colonial