Embedding Neoliberalism: Crisis, Sexuality and Social Reproduction

The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.This talk seeks to intervene in a vibrant and publicly prominent debate within development studies about the role of crisis in "postneoliberal" or post-Washington Consensus policy making. Gender and, especially, sexuality are largely absent from that debate. I ask: What do contemporary experiences of crisis reveal about the complex interconnections between rupture and shock on one hand, and gender and sexuality on the other? In concrete crisis conditions, which common sense groundworks of the present get unsettled, which get re-entrenched, and what is the role of the development industry in this process? Specifically, I ask how possibilities for alternative regimes of gender and sexuality are affected by economic crisis, using a case study of the World Bank's response to the 2001-02 Argentine crisis. Using interviews with NGOs and World Bank policy makers, and fieldwork on a family-strengthening loan called PROFAM, I argue that the denaturalization of free markets was articulated, in part, through the re-naturalization of monogamous heterosexual couplehood.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesWomen in DevelopmentOhio State University. Center for Latin American StudiesEvent webpage, event photo

Keeping Chance in Its Place: The Socio-Legal Regulation of Gambling

In the winter of 2010, driving through a blizzard to a research interview outside of Ottawa, one of the co-editors of this special issue—Kate Bedford—slid and spun off the road in her rental car. The interviewee—an 80-year-old man who organized a small weekly bingo game—helped dig her out. Sitting in the community centre with him afterwards, thawing, there was ample opportunity for Bedford to reflect on the diverse meanings attached to gambling and the complex ways in which it is regulated. The interviewee talked about ‘use of proceeds’ forms and validating expenses payments for volunteers, describing a gambling landscape that seemed a long way from dominant law and policy conversations. While commentators on the global financial crisis were drawing repeated analogies to casinos and poker, the less glamourous world of small-town bingo seemed to have slipped from view. This special issue is, in part, an effort to bring it back. In 2013, inspired by research in Ontario, Bedford began work on a large, international research grant into gambling regulation. Rather than focusing on relatively well-researched forms of gambling, such as casinos, the project centred bingo as a distinctively under-studied gambling sector. The second co-editor, Donal Casey, joined the initiative in 2015, believing that online gambling could provide a crucial new lens for his research into European Union (“EU”) law and regulation. As part of the research project, Bedford, Casey, and others convened a conference at the University of Kent in 2016 on socio-legal approaches to gambling, where scholars from nine countries and a number of disciplines presented their research. The seven papers that we have collected in this special issue are drawn from that conference, including one from our third co-editor, Alexandra Flynn. In this Introduction to the collection, we lay out what these papers offer to the field of gambling research and beyond. To begin, we identify the scholarly approaches to gambling upon which we wish to build (Part I). Then, we specify three contributions we seek to make through our socio-legal endeavors. First, this collection seeks to foreground the diverse, vernacular forms and places of play that are sometimes overlooked in gambling scholarship (Part II). Second, the papers take a distinctive pluralist approach that recognizes the multi-layered character of gambling regulation (Part III). Third, and finally, the interdisciplinary and methodologically-diverse nature of this special issue allows the papers, alongside the contributions in the Voices and Perspectives section, to speak to a wide range of debates within and outside academia (Part IV)

Bingo Regulation and the Feminist Political Economy of Everyday Gambling: In Search of the Anti-Heroic

This paper uses bingo?a lottery-style game particularly popular with older working class women?to take forward feminist political economy debates about the everyday. It highlights consumption and regulation as key to research on everyday political economy, and aims to contribute to the productive ways in which gambling has been used as a marker of the everyday within critical political economy. Rather than seeing gambling primarily in terms of vernacular risk-taking, however, it argues that gambling is also a pathway into exploring other, more self-effacing political economies?of entertainment, fundraising, sharing, and ‘having a laugh.’ Focusing on three key areas of regulatory dispute (over how to win bingo; who can participate; and what defines the game), the research suggests that players and workers are (re)enabling the diverse, plural nature of bingo as a political economic formulation?involving winning; entertainment; fund-raising; care; flirting; and playful speculation?in the face of technological and legal processes aiming to standardize the game’s meaning as commercial gambling

Regulating Everyday Gambling: A Photo Essay

This photo-essay arises out of a research project undertaken by Kate Bedford and colleagues on gambling regulation, and photographs of a local bingo hall taken by Andrea Shieber as part of an Adult Education photography course. The essay stages a three way dialogue between the photographs, interview data gathered as part of the research project from the case study of bingo regulation in England and Wales, and analysis of what bingo regulation can add to existing debates within political economy. It focuses on two themes: (1) the social, part-domestic nature of the bingo hall and (2) the key role of cash within bingo

Keeping Chance in Its Place: The Socio-Legal Regulation of Gambling

In the winter of 2010, driving through a blizzard to a research interview outside of Ottawa, one of the co-editors of this special issue—Kate Bedford—slid and spun off the road in her rental car. The interviewee—an 80-year-old man who organized a small weekly bingo game—helped dig her out. Sitting in the community centre with him afterwards, thawing, there was ample opportunity for Bedford to reflect on the diverse meanings attached to gambling and the complex ways in which it is regulated. The interviewee talked about ‘use of proceeds’ forms and validating expenses payments for volunteers, describing a gambling landscape that seemed a long way from dominant law and policy conversations. While commentators on the global financial crisis were drawing repeated analogies to casinos and poker, the less glamourous world of small-town bingo seemed to have slipped from view. This special issue is, in part, an effort to bring it back. In 2013, inspired by research in Ontario, Bedford began work on a large, international research grant into gambling regulation. Rather than focusing on relatively well-researched forms of gambling, such as casinos, the project centred bingo as a distinctively under-studied gambling sector. The second co-editor, Donal Casey, joined the initiative in 2015, believing that online gambling could provide a crucial new lens for his research into European Union (“EU”) law and regulation. As part of the research project, Bedford, Casey, and others convened a conference at the University of Kent in 2016 on socio-legal approaches to gambling, where scholars from nine countries and a number of disciplines presented their research. The seven papers that we have collected in this special issue are drawn from that conference, including one from our third co-editor, Alexandra Flynn. In this Introduction to the collection, we lay out what these papers offer to the field of gambling research and beyond. To begin, we identify the scholarly approaches to gambling upon which we wish to build (Part I). Then, we specify three contributions we seek to make through our socio-legal endeavors. First, this collection seeks to foreground the diverse, vernacular forms and places of play that are sometimes overlooked in gambling scholarship (Part II). Second, the papers take a distinctive pluralist approach that recognizes the multi-layered character of gambling regulation (Part III). Third, and finally, the interdisciplinary and methodologically-diverse nature of this special issue allows the papers, alongside the contributions in the Voices and Perspectives section, to speak to a wide range of debates within and outside academia (Part IV)

The Bingo Project: Rethinking Gambling Regulation

Permission to include this report in the Institute research repository granted by Sarah Slowe, University of Kent on January 30, 2017.Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, one of the UK’s main academic research funders, the three-year project selected four case studies of bingo in England and Wales, Canada, Brazil, and online in the European Union. We wanted to gain a good overview of the diverse ways in which bingo is played (online versus land-based; in commercial halls versus in charitable facilities), and of legal approaches (e.g. criminal prohibition, licensing as charitable activity; licensing as commercial activity).YesEconomic and Social Research Council [U.K.