Book Review: "Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reading the State as a Multi-Identity Formation: The Touch and Feel of Equality Governance
How does a sense of touch, figuratively and practically, get deployed within equality governance, and to what questions and ways of thinking about the state does this direct us? Taking 2009-2010 as a snap-shot moment in the development of British equality reform - the year leading up to passage of the Equality Act 2010 - this article explores the relationship between touch (the haptic) and equality governance from three angles. First, how have governmental bodies used touch language and imagery, including in geometrical representations of disadvantage? Second, what other, more challenging encounters and actions are imaginable; specifically, can touch mobilise the feeling state as a critical form of active citizenship? Third, what re-conceptualisations of the state does the touching, feeling state invoke, and with what effects? Specifically, does conceiving of the state as a multi-identity formation reframe the risks associated with a haptic state, thereby opening up new strategies for political action?
Introduction. Conceptualising Policy: Technologies of Governance and the Politics of Visibility
A revolutionary moment in the world's history is a time for revolutions, not for patching … Social insurance should be treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress. Social insurance fully developed may provide income security; it is an attack upon Want. But Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are disease, ignorance, Squalor and idleness … [S]ocial security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual … in establishing a national minimum, [the State] should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family. (Beveridge 1942: 1)
Analysing policy in the contexts of practice. A theoretical puzzle
2012
This essay contributes to the construction of a critically informed toolbox of diverse concepts for education policy analysis. Focusing on the context(s) of practice of the policy cycle, the article outlines an interpretative framework to grasp policy enactment across different localities, the influences bearing upon those enactments as well as their intended and unintended consequences. It has the underlying theoretical concern of building bridges between modern and postmodern approaches in policy analysis. The argument develops through three steps. First, it conceptualizes policy as discourse taking seriously the postmodern concerns with the discursive and power/knowledge regimes. The adoption of some concepts offered by Foucault’s archaeology allows the mapping of the generative interrelations linking policies to wider discursive contexts. Second, the postmodern sensibility is balanced with the introduction of heuristic devices drawn from the strategic relational approach and structuration theory to take into account the structural arrangements setting the possibilities and the conditions of policy enactment. Third, the bridging between modern and postmodern approaches is completed through the acceptance of a dialectic between subject decentring and recentring. A composite conceptualization of the agent’s internal structures is proposed to analyse how people can make a difference exerting their agentic powers.
Governing subjects, repression and equality (Chapter 1)
Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance?, 2015
Power Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance? How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters? Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss. Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.
The Centre for Welfare Reform, 2013
Foreword This is the second publication in our series - The Need for Roots. Like the first The Unmaking of Man, it begins by considering the causes of the human tragedy of the abuse and oppression of people with disabilities - especially people with intellectual disabilities. However this essay takes as its starting point the Winterbourne View scandal. This may not be familiar to readers from outside the United Kingdom, but is yet another example of institutional abuse within ‘care settings.’ But this time the abuse was not in an old long-stay institution, but in a high cost, modern, private residential unit for people with challenging behaviour. The authors begin by looking beyond the on-going failure to reduce such abuse through the self-contradictory effort to exert regimes of control, supervision and training on the staff working in human services. They see that this merely replicates the very problems that helped cause the abuse. The official story is that the staff are incompetent, not to be trusted, and so we must make them trustworthy. In this way another cycle of failure begins. Instead we are asked to consider what we know about what really works. We are offered a compelling account of the power of relationships in the achievement of empowerment. This brought to mind the work of a thinker whose work has not received enough attention. Hannah Arendt, in her essay On Violence, argues that the word power is misused when we apply it to systems of force, top-down control and violence. Power, she claims, can only be created by human beings working together as equals. Her starting point is the experience of the Greek polis - but the authors seem to suggest that we can also see it in proper support - two individuals working together, with freedom and equality, to achieve valued goals. The authors go further and expand upon the kinds of cultures that are created by different kinds of relationships. This is very useful because it helps us see that it is not just negative images or abnormal or devalued services that encourage institutionalisation and abuse. Instead their analysis suggests that it can be understood as beginning in simple and yet profound aspects of our relationships. The authors do not use the word love - but it is hard not to think that they are here articulating two aspects of love, true love, both an acceptance of the person, but also a faith in the person and their capacity to live a good life. Finding the right people or inculcating the right values becomes the central task of organising good support. But this is hard and it is not how the current system works. Instead it focuses on shaping behaviours, fitting people into organisational structures and setting policies. To find an alternative the authors suggest we think about the stories we do tell and the stories we should tell. If we accept the need for stories to be rooted in the values of empowerment, in a positive regard for both the value and the prospects of the person with disabilities, then certain stories are helpful, but many others are toxic. Many of the current stories told within organisations, policy-making or the general media merely reinforce the cultures of punishment, control or protection that we want to avoid. This is a particularly useful way of interrogating modern policymaking. It is useful to see that there are implicit negative meanings in all our policy stories about commissioning, service systems, regulation and consumerism. Even while policy-makers use words like capacity, citizenship and empowerment they then strip those words of meaning by the stories of commerce and control within which the words are used. Good words with no deeper roots become empty or even harmful. We could pursue this argument further by looking at one of the most modern themes in public policy. For example, the term ‘personalisation’ is used to refer to many attractive practices - but the very term ‘personalisation’ strips those ideas of meaning by focusing not on relationship, power and citizenship - but on the need for organisations to offer more personalised support. And so people become objects upon whom others must act - but now in a more ‘personalised’ way. The merits of this essay are many but two stand out. It asks us to start from the basics of our humanity - how we are with each other; and yet it shows that this can be a very fruitful way of understanding many of the problems we struggle with today in complex welfare systems. This must be one of the roots we must value more - our relationships with each other. In addition the authors reinforce the value of stories. Again it is interesting that Arendt also wanted to remind us of the value of stories. Within academia and policy-making there is great resistance to the use of such a seemingly naive approach. But all of us know that it is the stories that move us and it is the stories that trap us. It is not data - but the story into which the data is woven that matters. Stories reinforce the objective reality of our moral existence and yet they are plural, open and subject to multiple interpretation. Stories are human. This help us avoid the two extremes of empty relativism and scientific objectivism. Stories assert our moral value and equal status. Our equality cannot be measured - but it can be experienced in a respectful and well-told story about the life of a different human being. Good stories have deep roots - bad stories rip up the roots and leave us lost and unable to make sense of the world. John O’Brien and Simon Duffy
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