The Daily Mail and the Stephen Lawrence Murder

The Daily Mail's coverage of the 1993 race murder of Stephen Lawrence has been held up as an example of newspaper journalism at its best. It is a cause of pride to the paper, which has asserted that its 1997 front page accusing five men of the murder, and the comment and reporting that followed, brought about significant social and policy changes and helped achieve justice. The coverage has also been cited by the paper to rebut critics who accuse it of intolerance. Examined in detail here and set in their context, the paper's claims about its role in the case prove to be either exaggerated or not supported by evidence. The Mail's engagement in the Lawrence case involved a famous instance of editorial brilliance, but insofar as its campaign brought about or contributed to changes, they were not usually changes sought by the paper and they were sometimes contrary to its aims.     

Fixing race: visual representations of African Americans at the World's Columbian Exposition,Chicago, 1893

ABSTRACT

Cooks examines the Johnson family cartoon series published in Harper's Weekly during the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Her analysis addresses the series’ caricatures of African-American fairgoers in the context of the landmark exposition, a national celebration of America's cultural leadership and accomplishment since its ‘discovery’ by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The Johnson family cartoons are remarkable because they are the only racist images in the issues of Harper's Weekly in which they appear, highlighting the importance of their message that African Americans were an unwanted presence at an event that served to solidify America's national identity. The series provides insight into some of the social anxieties of white Americans regarding the presence of African Americans at the exposition. It also explores white American discomfort with racial and economic diversity through the antics of the imaginary yet symbolically representative Johnson family. Cooks's discussion includes a visual analysis of the cartoons and comparisons of the Johnson family images with photographs and illustrations of African-American labourers at the fair and with depictions of proper behaviour by white American fairgoers. This examination of the cartoon series questions the roles of race, class and social hierarchy in turn-of-the-century America, and illustrates that acceptable mainstream attitudes clung to ideas of racial prejudice.     

Beyond Nancy Fraser's 'perspectival dualism'

The bifurcation between economically and culturally orientated perspectives has become a central trope in critical thinking on the problems of social justice and injustice. This paper attempts a critical explication and assessment of Nancy Fraser's recent work on this problem. She attempts to transcend the culture-economy divide by proposing a 'perspectival dualism' in which distinctive 'economic-redistributive' and 'cultural-recognitive' logics of justice are analytically distinguished and practically combined so as to furnish a balanced strategy for left-critical praxis. The paper seeks to demonstrate how and why Fraser's dualistic perspective fails, insofar as it is untenable to confine recognitive claims to the realm of culture, since they can be seen to underpin both redistributively and culturally oriented manifestations of social struggle. An alternative, multi-axial and 'metatheoretical' conception of recognition is offered, one which, it is claimed, can encompass both economic and cultural struggles within its theoretical ambit.     

Teaching Obama: history,critical race theory and social work education

ABSTRACT

Barack Obama's first autobiography, Dreams from My Father (1995), explores themes of race and identity up to the late 1980s in the life of the first African American president. The book emphasizes Obama's personal struggle as the son of an interracial couple, and the social and environmental context that shaped his growth and transformation. Using the tools of critical race theory, Freeman illustrates how Obama's autobiography can be used in the classroom to explore an individual's developing racial consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s, and as a prism through which students can understand what it means to live in the post-civil-rights-movement era. Obama's life history illuminates how the ideas and meanings of racial progress in the United States are contested and struggled over on a daily basis at both the micro and macro level.     

Innocents and Oracles: The Child as a Figure of Knowledge and Critique in the Middle-Class Philosophical Imagination

Abstract

This paper argues that the figure of the child performs a critical function for the middle-class social imaginary, representing both an essential "innocence" of the liberal individual, and an excluded, unconscious remainder of its project of control through the management of knowledge. While childhood is invested with affect and value, children's agency and opportunities for social participation are restricted insofar as they are seen both to represent an elementary humanity and to fall short of full rationality, citizenship and identity. The diverse permutations of this figure, as it develops in the middle-class imagination, are traced from the writings of John Locke to the films of Michael Haneke (via Charles Dickens and Henry James), to interrogate what this ambivalence regarding childhood reflects about middle-class, adult identity.     

Social Citizenship of Young People in Europe: A Comparative Institutional Analysis*

This article explains the diversity of young people’s access to social welfare by distinguishing between two models of social citizenship in a comparative analysis of 15 Western European countries. On the one hand, social citizenship can be familialized, when young people are considered as children and therefore do not receive state benefits in their own name. This form of citizenship is found in Bismarckian welfare states, based on the principle of subsidiarity. On the other hand, it can be individualized, in which case young people can be entitled to benefits in their own right, insofar as they are considered as adults. This form of social citizenship is found more in Beveridgean welfare states.     

Storytelling and corporate social responsibility reporting: A case study commentary on U.K. food retailers

Stories, in one form or another, are probably as old as the human race, but in recent years, businesses have increasingly come to recognise the importance of storytelling. The aim of this paper is to offer an exploratory commentary on how storytelling is employed in the corporate social responsibility reporting process by the leading U.K. food retailers. The paper begins with an outline of the characteristics of storytelling within the corporate world, reviews the ways storytelling is employed by the U.K.'s top 10 food retailers' as part of their corporate social responsibility reporting processes. The paper identifies a number of storytelling formats, including photographs and images, video clips, messages, and cameo case studies, used by the selected U.K. food retailers, and offers some reflections on their current approaches to storytelling. Although the stories employed by the selected retailers often have a strong human impact and can strike emotive chords, the authors would argue that stories can, at least partly, be misleading in that they do not necessarily fully reflect a retailer's corporate social responsibility record.     

Prologue: the riddle of race

ABSTRACT

Bernard explores the myth of racelessness as it is currently circulating in American social discourse. The election of the first black American president has unleashed the term across the cultural landscape, from the mainstream media to the classrooms in which she teaches African American literature. Students use the term as a twenty-first-century incarnation of the civil rights-era concept of colour blindness. But racelessness does not represent an aspiration for equality as much as it represents an ambition to turn away from the realities of difference. It is code for a common ambition to avoid the realities of institutional racial inequalities, as well as personal experiences of cultural difference. The myth of racelessness intersects uncomfortably with current academic discourse that promotes the view of race as a social construction. Scientifically proven and irrefutably true, this discourse does not allow any room for the social experience of race and racial difference as it is lived by everyone every day, whether we like it or not. The election of President Barack Obama is a portal on to this current confusion about the concept of race, specifically, and blackness, in particular. Many pundits have speculated that Obama would not have been electable if he had had dark skin, if he were irrefutably black, in colour and culture. The fact that he himself has elected to call himself ‘black’ serves as the platform of Bernard's essay on the case of race in the United States.     

‘Who are ya?’ The national identities and belongings of British Asian football fans

British Asian men and women are known to be passionate followers of football, travelling far and wide to support the England men's team. Yet, despite evidence to support this, it is popularly thought that they cannot be authentic supporters of the nation as their loyalties are divided between England and their ancestral places of ‘home’. The findings of Ratna's research are mainly based on the oral testimonies of British Asian male and female football players/fans. Using their stories about following the game, her paper unpacks notions of national belonging by specifically exploring the interconnections of race, ethnicity, religion and gender. She argues that national inclusiveness is not guaranteed for British Asian fans; the changing articulations of race, ethnicity, religion and gender may lead to contingent, contradictory and complex patterns of national inclusiveness and exclusiveness.     

The Queer Jew: Gender,Sexuality and Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Antisemitism

In an attempt to understand the mechanisms that enable the perpetuation of racism, Judaken examines how antisemitic stereotypes can be reiterated in the discourse of those individuals most committed to the eradication of antisemitism. He argues that typologies - mythic images of collective identity - depend upon an associative logic. These associations are engendered in the construction of the Self (both individual and collective), by demarcating it-self from the Other(s), generally through tropes of gender, pathology and race. Judaken focuses on Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew,a text which Sartre called 'a declaration of war against antisemitic motifs', and argues that this unintended effect is the result of how Sartre conceptualizes both consciousness and the relation between the Self and Other in Being and Nothingness. This work of existential phenomenology, that sought radically to critique the western metaphysical tradition, nevertheless reinscribes dominant assumptions within western culture about gender and sexuality. Judaken shows how Sartre's re-citation of these assumptions fundamentally determines how he conceives of the relation between the antisemite and 'the Jew'. He concludes, however, by suggesting that imminent to Sartre's own position, there is an-other way of conceiving of the relation between Self and Other that might offer hope beyond the impasses of the western tradition's failures in embracing difference, singularity and particularity.     

Onerous passions: colonial anti-miscegenation rhetoric and the history of sexuality

ABSTRACT

Ehlers's analysis revisits Foucauldian conceptualizations of the history of sexuality in order to map the inextricability of race, gender and sexuality as they emerged in the context of the early American colonies. The salience of such an analysis lies in its ability to extend the terrain of Foucault's history, and brings new considerations to bear regarding the specific configurations of race, gender and sexual intersections in North American history. If, as Foucault insists, sexuality is a set of effects produced in bodies, behaviours and social relations, Ehlers reorients these claims to consider how these effects were racialized within the rubric of colonial anti-miscegenation rhetoric. Through such a tracing, it becomes evident that, from the early colonial context, sexuality was deployed to produce ‘ideal’ sexuality as a bastion of whiteness: that is, to configure and maintain ‘ideal’ sexuality as white.     

‘Illiberal Democracy’ after Post-Democracy: Revisiting the Case of Hungary

In taking stock of the ruling Fidesz party's project of ‘illiberal democracy’ in Hungary, this article first develops considerations based on Claude Lefort's democratic theory for critiquing ‘illiberal democracy’ and post-democracy alike, situating the former in an early 2010s post-democratic moment characterised by the emergence of a neoliberal crisis management regime in the Eurozone. ‘Illiberal democracy’ and ‘market-conforming democracy’ are both problematic from this standpoint insofar as they subordinate the key Lefortian dimension of democratic contestation to either the primacy of the markets or a reified conception of the ‘national interest’ as represented by a single party. The analysis then traces the development of ‘illiberal democracy’ and its construction of key signifiers such as the ‘national interest’ in programmatic speeches made by Viktor Orbán, from its beginnings in the post-democratic moment to subsequent crisis conjunctures in which it has redefined itself against ever newer threats.     

The Great British Education ‘Fraud’ of the Twentieth and Twenty‐First Centuries

The role played by educational credentials in British labour market recruitment changed radically during the mid‐twentieth century. Having higher or better credentials than others became a key determinant in selection for society's best‐paid jobs. The resulting race for them has had perverse effects. A large minority of graduates earn no more than non‐graduates or are in jobs for which they are ‘overeducated’. In various ways, the incentive to ‘stay ahead’ has prompted large expenditures by families to improve the qualifications a child obtains at school, while there is also now huge demand for postgraduate qualifications. Not only is there resulting social waste but also social injustice; while education was understood previously as a means of breaking down barriers to social mobility, it now has the opposite effect. This article explores the causes of these developments and outlines briefly how a new centre‐left agenda for education might be constructed.     

Reimagining race and gender in public administration and public policy: Insights from an interdisciplinary systematic review

Public administration scholarship on race and gender is motivated by normative concerns about social equity, and dominated by work on bureaucracy and its representativeness. Despite decades of research on race and gender in public administration, there has been limited engagement with racializing and gendering processes. Relatedly, scant attention is paid to other disciplines that center on race and gender in theorizing. The purpose of this review is to explore public administration scholarship on race and gender in the context of allied social science disciplines, reveal limits of current approaches in public administration, and articulate strategies for enhancing understanding of race and gender in public administration scholarship. We use bibliometric and content analysis methods to map the intellectual structure of social science scholarship on race and gender, highlight public administration's place in this structure, and compare public administration scholarship on race and gender with other social science disciplines.     

State-owned enterprises,state capitalism and social distribution in Singapore

State-owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds have ‘insured’ Singapore's domestic economy against financial crisis and restructuring interventions from multilateral institutions, engendered elite cohesion and political stability, binding middle class employees to the political system. This essay analyses paths by which the Singapore government established state-owned enterprises and transformed them into global enterprises. It also examines how sovereign wealth funds contribute to government social expenditure without increasing taxes. Such redistribution through state capitalism resonates with the People's Action Partys social democratic origins, inviting comparisons with contemporary developments in Chinese state-capitalism.     

From McCarthyism to the Tea Party: Interpreting Anti-Leftist Forms of US Populism in Comparative Perspective

This article presents an analysis of McCarthyite and Tea Party political discourse and explores the possibilities of utilizing populism as an analytic construct for making comparisons between the political and economic projects envisaged by these two conservative movements. Relying on a definition of populism as a universal discursive formation, this article argues that there is a similar structure to the discourses of McCarthyism and the Tea Party, which relies on the construction of a “left-oriented enemy,” posed as a threat to the American values of freedom and independence historically tied to the nation's “founding moment.” With this comparative discursive structure established, the article then explores the ideological differences between the movements and attempts to interpret them within a historical framework. This article concludes by asserting that cases of populism in the immediate postwar period such as McCarthyism were short lived compared to new cases of populism such as the Tea Party, insofar as the universal discursive structure of populism, which once proved to be an exceptional phenomenon within modern forms of political rule, is now becoming part of the institutionalized structure of democratic politics, evidenced by a number of cases taken in comparative-historical perspective.     

Race Equality after Enoch Powell

Enoch Powell's infamous speech casts a long shadow over race equality in the UK. Looking back to the 1968 Race Relations Bill and then forwards to the present social and political landscape this article explores how an uneven race equality story has been characteristic of the UK approach since Powell's intervention. If the intended objective of the initial and later race equality bills was to reduce ethnic and racial disparities to a marginal or ‘negligible’ level, then we are a great distance from success. If the objective was slightly different, but not unrelated, and sought to reshape public conventions on racism (and ethnic and racial diversity more broadly), then the answer is more complicated but also unfinished.     

Becoming black,becoming president

ABSTRACT

Speculation about the relationship between Barack Obama's election to the presidency and race in the United States was rife prior to, during and after his successful campaign. King looks at three aspects of this issue. First, as a kind of outsider, Obama had to prove himself black enough for African Americans of the traditional sort and not too dangerous for Whites. How did he achieve this? Second, Obama's election was made possible by changes in the voting behaviour of white Americans, particularly in the North, and the way that African Americans like Obama gained a foothold in, and at times control of, urban political machines, such as, in his case, Chicago. How have American historians treated this shift in white voting behaviour? Finally, the central question of how race still impinges on President Obama's performance as president. King concludes with a look at issues such as colour blindness and whiteness, the nature of black political identity and solidarity, and the variety of political roles from which a black leader such Obama can choose.     

The role of electoral geography in the territorialization of party systems

When does a country's social structure foster the development of territorialized party systems? This article argues that electoral geography – defined as the interaction between the geography of social diversity and electoral rules– is key to answering this question. I make two claims: first, the impact of geographically concentrated diversity on party system territorialization depends on the proportionality of electoral rules. Second, the types of geographic cleavages (ethnic versus economic) and whether they are overlapping or cross-cutting also affects the likelihood of party system territorialization (conditional on the electoral system). I test these claims with an original dataset measuring party system territorialization in 382 elections across 60 countries that also includes comparable cross-national measures of different types of geographically concentrated diversity (language, race, religion and income). The main conclusion is that proportional electoral systems and cross-cutting cleavages can act as a powerful constraint on the translation of territorial ethnic cleavages into territorialized party systems.