At læse Bourdieus "Kapitalen"

Af de mangfoldige arbejder af Pierre Bourdieu er The State Nobility måske det mest formidable og det mest paradoksale, og vil uden tvivl af netop disse grunde forvirre, om ikke forbløffe, mange af dens udenlandske læsere. For det første er det på en gang stædigt frankocentrisk i empirisk substans og omfang, og uimodståeligt universaliserende i analytisk hensigt og rækkevidde. For det andet, og dette er et af særkenderne ved Bourdieus sociologiske stil, er The State Nobility beslutsomt empirisk, data-ladet til en grad nær mætning, og alligevel besjælet af et kraftfuldt teoretisk projekt, som placerer det i epicenteret af debatterne om magt, kultur og fornuft ved århundredets afslutning

Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK

This article examines how the UK’s Troubled Families Programme (TFP) works as a strategy of domestication which produces and delimits certain forms of ‘family life’. Drawing upon critical geographies of home and empire, the article explores how the TFP works to manage the troubled family as part of a longer history of regulating unruly households in the name of national health and civilisation. Viewing the TFP as part of the production of heteronormative order, highlights how the policy remobilises and reconfigures older forms of colonial rule which work to demarcate between civility/savagery, the developable/undevelopable. In examining the postcolonial dimension of neoliberal social policy, the article stresses how the TFP relies on racializing and sexualised logics of socio-biological control borrowed from imperial eugenics. Reading the TFP in this way contributes to our understanding of neoliberal rule. That the troubled family can be either domesticated or destroyed (through benefit sanctions and eviction) equally reveals the extent to which domesticity works as a key site for the production of both ‘worthy’ and ‘surplus’ life

The ‘Great Decarceration’: Historical Trends and Future Possibilities

During the 19th Century, hundreds of thousands of people were caught up in what Foucault famously referred to as the ‘great confinement’, or ‘great incarceration’, spanning reformatories, prisons, asylums, and more. Levels of institutional incarceration increased dramatically across many parts of Europe and the wider world through the expansion of provision for those defined as socially marginal, deviant, or destitute. While this trend has been the focus of many historical studies, much less attention has been paid to the dynamics of ‘the great decarceration’ that followed for much of the early‐ to mid‐20th Century. This article opens with an overview of these early decarceration trends in the English adult and youth justice systems and suggests why these came to an end from the 1940s onwards. It then explores parallels with marked decarceration trends today, notably in youth justice, and suggests how these might be expedited, extended, and protected

Regulating E-Cigarettes: Why Policies Diverge

This paper, part of a festschrift in honor of Professor Malcolm Feeley, explores the landscape of e-cigarette policy globally by looking at three jurisdictions that have taken starkly different approaches to regulating e-cigarettes—the US, Japan, and China. Each of those countries has a robust tobacco industry, government agencies entrusted with protecting public health, an active and sophisticated scientific and medical community, and a regulatory structure for managing new pharmaceutical, tobacco, and consumer products. All three are signatories of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, all are signatories of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, and all are members of the World Trade Organization. Which legal, economic, social and political differences between the three countries explain their diverse approaches to regulating e-cigarettes? Why have they embraced such dramatically different postures toward e-cigarettes? In seeking to answer those questions, the paper builds on Feeley\u27s legacy of comparative scholarship, policy analysis, and focus on law in action

La sociología como socioanálisis: relatos de Homo academicus

A propósito de la obra de Pierre Bourdieu

Elías en el guetto

La teoría del proceso civilizatorio de Norbert Elias junto a sus comentarios sobre el proceso anverso ofrecen una poderosa herramienta para construir un diagnóstico sobre la mutación en el guetto negro norteamericano que tiene lugar a pertir de los años sesenta. Una adaptación de su marco nos uede ayudar a superar alguans de las perennes limitaciones que tienen los análisis convencionales de la intrincada cuestión de la raza y la clase en las metrópolis de los Estados Unido