Search results
Over half of England's secondary schools are now academies. The social and cultural outcomes prompted by this neoliberal educational model has received less scrutiny. This book draws on original research based at Dreamfields Academy, to show how the accelerated marketization and centralization of education is reproducing raced, classed and gendered inequalities. Urbanderry is a socially and economically mixed borough where poverty and gentrification coexist. The book sketches out the key features of Dreamfields' ethos before reflecting on the historical trajectories that underpin how education, urban space and formations of race, class and gender are discussed in the present. Academies have faced opposition for their lack of democratic accountability as they can set their own labour conditions, deviate from the national curriculum and operate outside local authority control. The book examines the complex stories underlying Dreamfields' glossy veneer of success and shows how students, teachers and parents navigate the everyday demands of Dreamfields' results-driven conveyor belt. It also examines how hierarchies are being reformulated. The book interrogates the social and cultural dimensions of this gift that seeks to graft more 'suitable' forms of capital onto its students. The focus is on the conditions underlying this gift's exchange with children, parents and teachers, remaining conscious of how value is generated from the power, perspective and relationships that create the initial conditions of possibility for exchange. Dreamfields acts as a symbolic and material response to the supposed failures of comprehensive education and public anxieties over the loss of nationhood and prestige of empire.
-led multinationals led to the implementation of labour conditions that disadvantaged local populations ( War on Want 2017 ). While these impacts are not often cited by politically violent actors, including neo-jihadists, they show how economic expropriation is experienced by the disadvantaged LDC populations to which spokespersons for AQ and IS, imprecisely though explicitly, refer ( Bin Laden 2007 ; Naji 2006 , 101; Al Hayat 2015a ). The harmful impacts of labour conditions in deregulated industries are illustrated by the fires in Pakistan and Bangladesh between 2010 and
aspiration’ (DCFS, 2009; Adonis, 2008). Former Minister of State for Education Lord Adonis described how these schools would build aspirational cultures and act as ‘engines of social mobility and social justice’ at the ‘vanguard of meritocracy’ (Adonis, 2008). Poverty is not framed as a structural problem, but born out of ‘cultures of low aspiration’. Academies have faced opposition for their lack of democratic accountability as they can set their own labour conditions, deviate from the national curriculum and operate outside local authority control. Urbanderry is a
hold before their customers, which lead them to exert downward pressures Labour segmentation and precariousness in Spain 141 on labour conditions; and the social valuation of these jobs where outsourced can often be conflated with meanings about ‘low-skilled’, ‘simple’ and unimportant activities, which have a damaging impact on these workers’ bargaining capacity. But this same situation can be seen in the subcontracting of activities of other kinds. In some cases, outsourcing allows subcontractor companies to operate in collective agreements more appropriate to
/Slow University of Warsaw . Despite its somewhat ironic resonance, the term informs a materialist, critical and dialectic effort at understanding the labour conditions of the highly mobile artistic workforce. It is not specific to the global networks of contemporary art but is more generally referenced in critical management studies and analysis of international NGOs, wherever people work on a project-to-project basis (Baker 2014 ; Greer, Samaluk and Umney 2018 ; Jałocha 2016 ). Projects are adopted not only in the world of contemporary art, but also dominate sectors such as
Precarious objects is a book about activism and design. The context is the changes in work and employment from permanent to precarious arrangements in the twenty-first century in Italy. The book presents design interventions that address precarity as a defuturing force affecting political, social and material conditions. Precarious objects shows how design objects, called here ‘orientation devices’, recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life. Three microhistories illustrate activist repertoires that bring into play design, and design practices that are grounded in activism. While the vitality, experimental nature and traffic between theory and praxis of social movements in Italy have consistently attracted the interest of activists, students and researchers in diverse fields, there exists little in the area of design research. This is a study of design activism at the intersection of design theory and cultural research for researchers and students interested in design studies, cultural studies, social movements and Italian studies.
This book explains the direct link between the structure of the corporation and its limitless capacity for ecological destruction. It argues that we need to find the most effective means of ending the corporation’s death grip over us. The corporation is a problem, not merely because it devours natural resources, pollutes and accelerates the carbon economy. As this book argues, the constitutional structure of the corporation eradicates the possibility that we can put the protection of the planet before profit. A fight to get rid of the corporations that have brought us to this point may seem an impossible task at the moment, but it is necessary for our survival. It is hardly radical to suggest that if something is killing us, we should over-power it and make it stop. We need to kill the corporation before it kills us.
The well-being of Europe’s citizens depends less on individual consumption and more on their social consumption of essential goods and services – from water and retail banking to schools and care homes – in what we call the foundational economy. Individual consumption depends on market income, while foundational consumption depends on social infrastructure and delivery systems of networks and branches, which are neither created nor renewed automatically, even as incomes increase. This historically created foundational economy has been wrecked in the last generation by privatisation, outsourcing, franchising and the widespread penetration of opportunistic and predatory business models. The distinctive, primary role of public policy should therefore be to secure the supply of basic services for all citizens (not a quantum of economic growth and jobs). Reconstructing the foundational has to start with a vision of citizenship that identifies foundational entitlements as the conditions for dignified human development, and likewise has to depend on treating the business enterprises central to the foundational economy as juridical persons with claims to entitlements but also with responsibilities and duties. If the aim is citizen well-being and flourishing for the many not the few, then European politics at regional, national and EU level needs to be refocused on foundational consumption and securing universal minimum access and quality. If/when government is unresponsive, the impetus for change has to come from engaging citizens locally and regionally in actions which break with the top down politics of ‘vote for us and we will do this for you’.
the Second World War have endeavoured to harness international cooperation to address non-economic issues like protection of human rights, labour conditions and the environment, and the improvement of human health. Only during the late 1990s did the idea that globalisation needed to be civilised take root as a conscious strategy. Notes 1 J. Bové and F. Dufour, The World Is Not for Sale: Farmers Against Junk Food (London: Verso, 2001), p. 5. 2 W. Northcutt, ‘José Bové vs. McDonald’s: The Making of a National Hero in the 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
This work demonstrates that resistance to occupation by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Second World War has to be seen through a transnational, not a national, lens. It explores how people often resisted outside their country of origin because they were migrants, refugees or exiles who were already on the move. It traces their trajectories and encounters with other resisters and explores their experiences, including changes of beliefs, practices and identities. The book is a powerful, subtle and thought-provoking alternative to works on the Second World War that focus on single countries or on grand strategy. It is a ‘bottom up’ story of extraordinary individuals and groups who resisted oppression from Spain to the Soviet Union and the Balkans. It challenges the standard chronology of the war, beginning with the formation of the International Brigades in Spain and following through to the onset of the Cold War and the foundation of the state of Israel. This is a collective project by a team of international historians led by Robert Gildea, author of Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Faber & Faber, 2015). These have explored archives across Europe, the USA, Russia and Israel in order to unearth scores of fascinating individual stories which are woven together into themed chapters and a powerful new interpretation. The book is aimed at undergraduates and graduates working on twentieth-century Europe and the Second World War or interested in the possibilities of transnational history.