'Something different for the weekend' - alterity, performance, routine and proficiency at farmers' markets in the northeast of England

The focus of this chapter is the role of alterity and performance in buying food at farmers’ markets. Alterity is the context in which farmers’ markets are readily understood and situated (Spiller 2007; Youngs 2003); buying at a market is different to buying at, for instance, a supermarket, and as Hetherington (1997) might suggest, farmers’ markets appropriate a heterotopic space where a marginal force implies ideals - however temporary or ephemeral that space maybe . Nevertheless, as I argue, as performances become routine, the proficiency of such actions render them normal. In contrast to what were once reactionary or alternative sites to developments and incidences in farming and food in the UK today, the farmers’ markets may now have become normalized or to some extent non-alternative. A focus of this chapter is the corporeality at the markets, which encourages performances during the event of buying, selling or just being at a farmers’ market. Performance and its delivery is distinctly corporeal and linguistic in projecting the meanings and understandings that litter everyday life, and intrinsically performance is inescapable from identity, as every interaction and action between actors incorporates degrees of performance. When producers and consumers meet at the markets, the performances take on the guise of difference, in that the markets awaken carnivalesque connotations, because inherently the markets are not everyday, or are not supermarkets

Gaining access to CCTV images is far more difficult than the legislation suggests it ought to be

Under the 1998 Data Protection Act, citizens have the right to access CCTV images of themselves. One researcher, Keith Spiller, sought to test out how easy it actually is to gain access to the footage, and sought to deliberately stand in site of CCTV cameras for two minutes at a time. He found it far more difficult to gain access to the images than the legislation suggests it ought to be

Farmers' markets as assemblage: social relations, social practice and the producer/consumer nexus in the north east of England

Farmers' markets have recently enjoyed some academic attention and situated within this is a valuable reading of the contexts that surround markets, of particular interest have been the nascent forces that have encouraged the re-emergence of food markets. Prior to the more recent growth interest towards food production and sourcing, opportunities to engage with alternative means of food sourcing were somewhat limited in a British context.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

‘Putting everything up there’: framing how we navigate the intricacies of privacy and security on social media

Posting commentary via social media can have very real consequences, and these can drive how users navigate the world of social media. The aim of this article is to develop a deeper appreciation of how users comprehend their security and privacy within their social media interactions. I turn to Anderson’s work on street life in attempting to draw upon the decisions made in navigating particular environments—especially those with associated risks. This I argue is similar to how users rationalize their social media behavior to protect themselves and/or view others. Both are learned behaviors that are at times habituated, reactionary, or temporary in the face of heightened threats. Using findings from 27 interviews with UK social media users, I present three codes that may be useful in framing just how users navigate and comprehend their experiences of social media privacy and security

‘What does terrorism look like?’: university lecturers’ interpretations of their Prevent duties and tackling extremism in UK universities

The UK Counter Terrorism and Security Act (2015) (CTSA) calls for a partnership between the government, individuals, organisations and communities to prevent the radicalisation of individuals and to prevent their participation in terrorist and illegal activities. As part of this strategy, universities have a statutory duty placed upon them to remain vigilant to signs of extremism. Based upon 20 interviews with UK university lecturers, the paper examines reactions of the academic community to this governmental mandate. Key to our understanding is the deputisation of lecturers into a security regime and how they perform the duty of identifying and monitoring extremism. Equally, forms of resistance are evident in how lecturers understand their new roles and for universities themselves a conservative approach to risk may be gaining traction. We argue there is confusion around the CTSA based upon the ambiguous language in which it is presented and the conservative and defensive reactions that have subsequently produced concern amongst lecturers and UK universities

The Politic of Everyday Counterterrorism: online performances and responsibilities of the Prevent Duty in UK Higher Education Institutions

The Prevent Duty mandates that public authorities must work to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism. In this paper we review how 158 UK HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) have responded to this new duty by examining their public facing webpages and Prevent policy documentation. In doing this we draw upon de Certeau’s notions of the everyday to highlight how such initiatives are presented publicly to viewing audiences, and how messages seep into and deepen security measures within UK Higher Education. In reviewing the performative element of Prevent, specifically how information is displayed, we find that the majority of UK HEIs have approached their new roles through the prism of ‘compliance’ and/or ‘safeguarding’. The paper argues presentations of safeguarding, reassurance and reluctance offer a telling insight into how the Duty has been adopted in HEIs everyday practice

IRISS (Increasing Resilience in Surveillance Societies) FP7 European Research Project, Deliverable 4.2: Doing privacy in everyday encounters with surveillance.

The main idea of IRISS WP 4 was to analyse surveillance as an element of everyday life of citizens. The starting point was a broad understanding of surveillance, reaching beyond the narrowly defined and targeted (nonetheless encompassing) surveillance practices of state authorities, justified with the need to combat and prevent crime and terrorism. We were interested in the mundane effects of surveillance practices emerging in the sectors of electronic commerce, telecommunication, social media and other areas. The basic assumption of WP 4 was that being a citizen in modern surveillance societies amounts to being transformed into a techno-social hybrid, i.e. a human being inexorably linked with data producing technologies, becoming a data-leaking container. While this “ontological shift” is not necessarily reflected in citizens’ understanding of who they are, it nonetheless affects their daily lives in many different ways. Citizens may entertain ideas of privacy, autonomy and selfhood rooted in pre-electronic times while at the same time acting under a regime of “mundane governance”. We started to enquire about the use of modern technologies and in the course of the interviews focussed on issues of surveillance in a more explicit manner. Over 200 qualitative interviews were conducted in a way that produced narratives (stories) of individual experiences with different kinds of technologies and/or surveillance practices. These stories then were analysed against the background of theoretical hypotheses of what it means in objective terms to live in a surveillance society. We assume that privacy no longer is the default state of mundane living, but has to be actively created. We captured this with the term privacy labour. Furthermore we construed a number of dilemmas or trade-off situations to guide our analysis. These dilemmas address the issue of privacy as a state or “good” which is traded in for convenience (in electronic commerce), security (in law enforcement surveillance contexts), sociality (when using social media), mutual trust (in social relations at the workplace as well as in the relationship between citizens and the state), and engagement (in horizontal, neighbourhood watch-type surveillance relations). For each of these dilemmas we identified a number of stories demonstrating how our respondents as “heroes” in the narrative solved the problems they encountered, strived for the goals they were pursuing or simply handled a dilemmatic situation. This created a comprehensive and multi-dimensional account of the effects of surveillance in everyday life. Each of the main chapters does focus on one of these different dilemmas

IRISS (Increasing Resilience in Surveillance Societies) FP7 European Research Project, Deliverable 3.2: Surveillance Impact Report

External research report produced for the European Commission as part of the FP7 IRISS project: Increasing Resilience in Surveillance Socieities, containing European case studies on the varying formats of neighbourhood watch, including the cultural and historical factors which may influence the creation of neighbourhood watch groups in the first instance. Overview of neighbourhood watch in the United Kingdom and analysis of the changing role of the police in relation to community policing and the impact which this has had on the primary purpose of neighbourhood watch organisations.This deliverable was written as part of the IRISS project which received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under Grant Agreement No. 285593. Additional co-authors: Alessia Ceresa, Chiara Fonio, Walter Peissl, Robert Rothman, Jaro Sterbik Lamina, Ivan Szekely, Beatrix Vissy, Wolfgang Bonß, Daniel Fischer, Gemma Galdon Clavell, Reinhard Kreissl, Alexander Neumann, Nils Zurawsk