The role of social media and network capital in assisting migrants in search of a less precarious existence in Saudi Arabia

Precarity is a consequence of the shift from Fordism, which was linked to lasting and secure employment, to post-Fordism underpinned by flexible labour with provisional, casual, unstable, low-paying jobs. Globalization and widening inequalities around the world have driven people to migrate in search of a better life. This paper aims to explore the extent to which migrants in Saudi Arabia use social media sites to facilitate their migration process in search of a better life. We found that social media strengthens social networks, which play an important role in influencing individuals’ decision to migrate. Their social network helped migrants during the planning and the actual migration to Saudi Arabia. Moreover, migrants used social media to persuade or assist relatives and friends ‘back home’ to migrate to Saudi Arabia

“Singing Up the Second Story”: Acts of Community Development Scholar “Delicate Activism” Within the Neoliberal University

Drawing on the conceptual work of "Bifo" Beradi and Nicholas Rose , this chapter examines the possibilities of academic resistance to neoliberalism. In the context of neoliberalism, which is explained below, we focus on the phenomenon whereby academia is currently constructed in a way that it contradictorily both draws on our "creative selves" --our "soul" as Beradi conceives of it..

'Non-servile virtuosi' in insubordinate spaces: school disaffection, refusal and resistance in a former English coalfield

This article reviews excerpts from a body of ethnographic data examining some young people’s disaffection from, and refusal of, the education project as a whole in a UK coalfield area. Key examples are used to illustrate intergenerational continuities and disjunctions in attitudes to formal education in these exceptional and sometimes ‘insubordinate’ localities. It is argued that reviewing such data in the light of concepts emerging from the literature on Italian autonomist politics of the 1970s – particularly Paulo Virno’s work – is potentially fruitful in reclaiming a politics of educational refusal from the dual grip of a middle-class imaginary that abhors it as pathological and dangerous and a body of scholarship that seems incapable of moving beyond either lionising it as heroic or loathing it as nihilistic