Designed to fail : a biopolitics of British Citizenship.

Tracing a route through the recent 'ugly history' of British citizenship, this article advances two central claims. Firstly, British citizenship has been designed to fail specific groups and populations. Failure, it argues, is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate. Secondly, British citizenship is a biopolitics - a field of techniques and practices (legal, social, moral) through which populations are controlled and fashioned. This article begins with the 1981 Nationality Act and the violent conflicts between the police and black communities in Brixton that accompanied the passage of the Act through the British parliament. Employing Michel Foucault's concept of state racism, it argues that the 1981 Nationality Act marked a pivotal moment in the design of British citizenship and has operated as the template for a glut of subsequent nationality legislation that has shaped who can achieve citizenship. The central argument is that the existence of populations of failed citizens within Britain is not an accident of flawed design, but is foundational to British citizenship. For many 'national minorities' the lived realities of biopolitical citizenship stand in stark contradistinction to contemporary governmental accounts of citizenship that stress community cohesion, political participation, social responsibility, rights and pride in shared national belonging

June 12, 2011: Graduation Prayer and the Defense of Secular Government

Blog post, “Graduation Prayer and the Defense of Secular Government“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America

Ireland’s Press Ombudsman, John Horgan, on accountability, regulation and redress: Where do press councils stand?

In recent years, the creation of a number of press councils in Europe and elsewhere, as well as the concurrent appointment of internal ombudsmen or readers’ representatives in many significant newspapers, particularly in the United States, is a clear response to a growing public perception that there is a need for an appropriate level of accountability for the print media. It is fair to assume that this is related, in part, to a public perception that there is a need for remedies for abuses of media power – as there is a need for remedies for abuses of institutional power in any society

The Sleeper Wakes: The History and Legacy of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment

No provision of the United States Constitution has a more drawn-out, tortured history than the Twenty-seventh Amendment, which was ratified more than two centuries after Representative James Madison introduced it in the First Congress. In this Article; Professor Bernstein traces the Amendment\u27s origins to the legislative political culture of the late eighteenth century, as influenced by the controversy over ratifying the Constitution. He then examines the perennial controversies over congressional compensation in American historiy elucidating how in the 1980s and 1990s public anger at Congress reached critical mass sufficient to propel the 1789 compensation amendment into the Constitution. Finally, this Article demonstrates that the adoption of the Amendment has consequences beyond its effects on congressional compensation-both for the unresolved issues of the Article V amending process and for the practice of amendment politics

Evangelical Visitor - November 28, 1949 Vol. LXII. No. 23.

Vol. LXII. No. 23

Quantifying learning: measuring student outcomes in higher education in England

Since 2014, the government in England has undertaken a programme of work to explore the measurement of learning gain in undergraduate education. This is part of a wider neoliberal agenda to create a market in higher education, with student outcomes featuring as a key construct of value for money. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (subsequently dismantled) invested £4 million in funding 13 pilot projects to develop and test instruments and methods for measuring learning gain, with approaches largely borrowed from the US. Whilst measures with validity in specific disciplinary or institutional contexts were developed, a robust single instrument or measure has failed to emerge. The attempt to quantify learning represented by this initiative should spark debate about the rationale for quantification—whether it is for accountability, measuring performance, assuring quality or for the enhancement of teaching, learning and the student experience. It also raises profound questions about who defines the purpose of higher education; and whether it is those inside or outside of the academy who have the authority to decide the key learning outcomes of higher education. This article argues that in focusing on the largely technical aspects of the quantification of learning, government-funded attempts in England to measure learning gain have overlooked fundamental questions about the aims and values of higher education. Moreover, this search for a measure of learning gain represents the attempt to use quantification to legitimize the authority to define quality and appropriate outcomes in higher education