shaun french | University of Nottingham (original) (raw)

Papers by shaun french

A co-authored and co-curated series of reflections on the 2018 UCU strikes in British Universitie... more A co-authored and co-curated series of reflections on the 2018 UCU strikes in British Universities, protesting against proposed pension reforms.

Drugs: Education, Prevention, and Policy, 2014

ABSTRACT This article describes the way in which “Anstie’s Limit” – a particular definition of mo... more ABSTRACT This article describes the way in which “Anstie’s Limit” – a particular definition of moderate drinking first defined in Britain in the 1860s by the physician Francis Edmund Anstie (1833–1874) – became established as a useful measure of moderate alcohol consumption. Becoming fairly well-established in mainstream Anglophone medicine by 1900, it was also communicated to the public in Britain, North America and New Zealand through newspaper reports. However, the limit also travelled to less familiar places, including life assurance offices, where a number of different strategies for separating moderate from excessive drinkers emerged from the dialogue between medicine and life assurance. Whilst these ideas of moderation seem to have disappeared into the background for much of the twentieth century, re-emerging as the “J-shaped” curve, these early developments anticipate many of the questions surrounding uses of the “unit” to quantify moderate alcohol consumption in Britain today. The article will therefore conclude by exploring some of the lessons of this story for contemporary discussions of moderation, suggesting that we should pay more attention to whether these metrics work, where they work and why.

City mattersCompetitiveness, cohesion and urban governance, 2004

... and relocation of financial services in the UK from the early 1970s along with cities such as... more ... and relocation of financial services in the UK from the early 1970s along with cities such as Leeds and Edinburgh (French and Leyshon, 2003). ... Southmead ward (628th nationally), for example, sits next to Westbury (7363 rd) while Ashley (756th) is adjacent to Redland (7367 th ...

The Economic Geography of the UK, 2010

Journal of Economic Geography, 2004

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2012

Cultural industries and the production of culture, Sep 24, 2004

In this chapter we explore what happens in theory and in practice when Internet technologies are ... more In this chapter we explore what happens in theory and in practice when Internet technologies are adopted within the cultural industries. This dual focus on e-commerce and the cultural industries is, we argue, signiﬁcant not just empirically but conceptually too. Whilst there has been considerable debate about what precisely constitutes the cultural industries (see Du Gay and Pryke, 2002, for example), there is a reasonable consensus, as Power and Scott in the introduction to this volume make clear, that at the very least their ...

This paper is concerned with biofinancialisation; that is, with the ways in which contemporary pr... more This paper is concerned with biofinancialisation; that is, with the ways in which contemporary processes of financialisation and biopolitics intermesh and interpolate. While the significance of the relation between the bios and circuits of finance has begun to be recognised, biofinancialisation remains little interrogated. In seeking to address this lacuna, the paper focuses on the recent transformation of the UK after-retirement market and, in particular, the invention of enhanced and impaired pension annuities. Enhanced annuity products like the ‘smokers’ pension’ provide, we argue, a striking example of the ways in which biofinancialisation works to fashion new worlds for capitalist accumulation, in this case through the capitalisation of morbidity and of the residual vital capacities of life, and the ways in which novel forms of biofinancial subject and subjectivity are produced to populate such worlds – to make them live. The paper concludes by identifying three political fracture points or fault lines in the enterprise to secure life biofinancially through the enhancing of annuities: first, the promise of reconciliation; second, the promise of autonomy and freedom; and, third, the promise of a good retirement.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Progress in Human Geography

Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2009

Abstract The paper argues that the origins of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 can ultimately be... more Abstract The paper argues that the origins of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 can ultimately be located in four spaces: in international financial centres, in particular, in the longstanding competition that has existed between London and New York; in the insularity of the everyday geographies of money that have emerged in such centres in the wake of the apparent hegemony of financialization; in the geographical recycling of surpluses and deficits and, more particularly, the structural dependency that has grown up between China and the ...

Antipode, 2008

Abstract: This paper examines an apparent anomaly that lies at the heart of processes of financi... more Abstract: This paper examines an apparent anomaly that lies at the heart of processes of financial exclusion within Britain. Given that the branch networks of banks and building societies have shrunk in size by about one-third since 1989, a period during which the Government has launched a wide-ranging set of policies to tackle financial exclusion, why is it that the issue of branch closure has been neutralised as a political issue? After providing evidence to show the extent of branch closure in Britain and illustrating the ways in which geographical research in particular has drawn attention to the nature of this problem, we look at the way the issue of physical access to financial services has been discursively and politically marginalised. We undertake a detailed history of public policy in the area, and the ways in which research funded by industry bodies and Government departments has been used and framed to build a pro-market, neoliberal policy programme that constructs branch closures as natural and inevitable.

Transactions of The Institute of British Geographers, 2008

Financial exclusion refers to those processes by which individuals and households face difficulti... more Financial exclusion refers to those processes by which individuals and households face difficulties in accessing financial services. Economic geography was an important catalyst in developing research into processes of financial exclusion in the 1990s, focusing initially on the geographies of physical access. This research was motivated by a concern with the equity effects of financial systems, and identifying a general process of branch closure across industrial economies. The paper contains an analysis of the changing geographies of bank and building society closure in Britain between 1995 and 2003 and reveals that closures continue to be disproportionately concentrated within poorer areas, yet the geography of financial infrastructure has been written out of UK financial exclusion policy. The paper concludes by arguing that policy needs to take greater account of the uneven geography of retail financial services production and consumption.