Administrative reform is threatening the independence of the Equality and Human Rights Commission

Conservative plans to scrap the Human Rights Act have been postponed amid opposition. Yet despite the absence of radical change, Katherine Tonkiss explains how administrative reforms to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s governance impact directly on its independence, and possibly on how human rights in the UK are being protected

City government and urban inequalities

What potential do city governments have to prevent and mitigate worsening urban inequalities? Focusing on different urban scales of government, this discussion goes beyond the core tasks of urban service provision to consider strategies of: (i) distribution and deliberation (e.g. revenue measures, living wages or participatory budgeting); (ii) housing and planning (e.g. equity planning, inclusionary zoning, anti-displacement measures, social housing programmes); (iii) environment and infrastructure (e.g. water and waste services, mass transit and non-motorised transport alternatives); and (iv) urban citizenship (e.g. freedom of information, association and movement; public realm and open space strategies)

The undergraduate dissertation

LSE Sociologists, it is final year- that means dissertation! This blog is to provide some reassurance, and hopefully answer any questions you may have about the sociological dissertation. This is for you to refer back to as you progress throughout your dissertation course. Course convenor Fran Tonkiss provided an interview and some advice about the sociological dissertation project. To find out more about Fran’s work, click here

Contesting human rights through institutional reform:a case study of the reform of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission

This article presents a case study of the recent reform of the United Kingdom Equalities and Human Rights Commission, to address a critical gap in the literature on national human rights institutions (NHRIs) concerning the power of governments to exert control over these institutions through reform processes. Through this analysis, the article demonstrates, first, that NHRIs are affected by contextual factors not only related to the popularity of the human rights agenda but also to wider policy agendas which impact on their status and functions; and second, that attempts by government to exert more administrative control can be significantly problematic for the operational independence of NHRIs

Constitutional patriotism and the post-national paradox: an exploration of migration, identity and loyalty at the local level

Theorists of constitutional patriotism argue that the binding sentiment of shared national identity can be replaced with allegiance to universal principles, interpreted into particular constitutions through ongoing deliberative processes. In this thesis, I explore the implications of such an approach for the defensibility of restrictions on migration, a subject which has previously received very little attention. I argue that constitutional patriotism implies a commitment to the free movement of individuals across borders; but that freedom of movement itself creates challenges for the implementation of constitutional patriotism. This is because it may increase anti-immigrant, nationalist sentiment in the host community. I term this phenomenon the ‘post-national paradox’. I then draw on independently collected qualitative data on Eastern European migration to English rural communities to explore this post-national paradox. I analyse the argumentative strategies, as the well as the perceptions of difference, evident in justifications of anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment in these contexts. I highlight both perceptions of cultural and economic threat, as well as a ‘banal’ sense of national loyalty, underpinning such attitudes; and suggest that discursive practice at the most local level is necessary for the bottom up construction, or growth, of an inclusive form of identity and belonging

Fast scholarship is not always good scholarship: relevant research requires more than an online presence.

Blogging and social media are tools to facilitate engagement, but are they in danger of being treated as ends in themselves? Catherine Durose and Katherine Tonkiss argue for more awareness on how the research process can democratise knowledge. Rather than quickly responding to recent events, scholars should look towards sustained engagement with the participants of research and those affected by it

Austerity urbanism and the makeshift city

This paper engages with a recent set of critical arguments concerning the 'post-crisis city' and the political economy of 'austerity urbanism'. The focus of the discussion is on practical interventions in the vacant and disused spaces of recessionary cities, and in particular on temporary designs and provisional uses. In this way, it opens a further line of argument about urbanism under conditions of austerity, alongside analyses of the formal politics of austerity or the possibilities of urban activism in these settings. Its concern is with forms of urban intervention that re-work orthodoxies of urban development as usual: in particular the timescales that inform conventional development models; the understandings of use around which sites are planned and designed; and the ways in which value is realized through the production of urban spaces. The argument centres on European contexts of austerity urbanism, drawing on critical examples of urban design and occupation in the region's largest economies. Such urban strategies are concerned with a politics and a practice of small incursions in material spaces that seek to create a kind of 'durability through the temporary'

SocSocialising design? From consumption to productionialising design? From consumption to production

The notion that design should be socially engaged has become an article of architectural faith, but it is not always clear what we want from design in social terms, or want the social to do or to be within design processes. In the discussion that follows, I consider some of the core ways in which ideas of the social inform the field of spatial design. Debates over social architecture are frequently concerned with alternative and activist approaches to the practice of design, and the papers in this collection take up in critical mode a range of right-thinking and left-leaning interventions which are committed to social ends, processes and values. There is a strong orientation in this field to low-income urbanism as the crucible for socialised design—in contexts where the ‘social’ may be the chief or only resource in conditions of state under-capacity and capital indifference. My focus, however, is less on avowedly engaged practices of spatial design than on the social dimensions of more orthodox—and generally more powerful—designs on space. The initial aim is to call out the versions of the social implicated in mainstream design and development in rich-world settings. Such an account begins with the social sites in which design projects take place, and the social uses to which the latter are geared. The larger aim of the discussion, however, is to go beyond a concept of the social as the context or the object of design to think more critically about the social relations of production which shape design as a process and produce space as a design outcome