The political ethics of consumerism

This article draws on research into the development and growth of ethical consumption in the UK to suggest why consumerism and citizenship are not necessarily opposed practices. Consumer-oriented activism offers important pathways to political participation for ordinary people. The organisations involved in this field embed consumer-oriented activism in wider programs of mobilisation, activism, lobbying and campaigning, enrolling ordinary people in active political engagement

Postsecularity, political resistance, and protest in the Occupy Movement

This paper examines and critically interprets the interrelations between religion and the Occupy movements of 2011. It presents three main arguments. First, through an examination of the Occupy Movement in the UK and USA—and in particular of the two most prominent Occupy camps (Wall Street and London Stock Exchange)—the paper traces the emergence of postsecularity evidenced in the rapprochement of religious and secular actors, discourses, and practices in the event-spaces of Occupy. Second, it examines the specific set of challenges that Occupy has posed to the Christian church in the UK and USA, arguing that religious participation in the camps served at least in part to identify wider areas of religious faith that are themselves in need of redemption. Third, the paper considers the challenges posed by religious groups to Occupy, not least in the emphasis on postmaterial values in pathways to resistance against contemporary capitalism

The Christchurch earthquakes 2010, 2011: Geographies of an event

This study provides a commentary of the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 as a theoretical (as well as empirical) event. Drawing on the ideas of Alain Badiou, it represents the earthquakes and their aftershocks as a rupturing of the established order of things; a distinctive space in which fidelity to the event has the potential to unleash new beginnings and imaginations. Qualitative research by the authors with older people and third sector organisations in Christchurch provides initial evidence of the mundane encounters with the truth of the event, and of the fostering of alternative subjectivities and creative participatory practices that arise in fidelity to the event

Problematising practices: Authors' response

Authors' response to reviews of Globalising Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption (Wiley-Blackwell)

Quartz solubility in potassium hydroxide solutions under elevated pressures and temperatures with some geological applications

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Geology, 1954.Vita.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-87).by Paul Leroy Cloke.Ph.D

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption presents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. *Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes. *Provides empirical research on everyday consumers, social networks, and campaigns. *Fills a gap in research on the topic with its distinctive focus on fair trade consumption. *Locates ethical consumption within a range of social theoretical debates -on neoliberalism, governmentality, and globalisation. *Challenges the moralism of much of the analysis of ethical consumption, which sees it as a retreat from proper citizenly politics and an expression of individualised consumerism

Neoliberalism, big society, and progressive localism

In the UK the current Coalition government has introduced an unprecedented set of reforms to welfare, public services, and local governance under the rubric of ‘localism’. Conventional analytics of neoliberalism have commonly portrayed the impacts of these changes in the architectures of governance in blanket terms: as an utterly regressive dilution of local democracy; as an extension of conservative political technology by which state welfare is denuded in favour of market-led individualism; and as a further politicised subjectification of the charitable self. Such seemingly hegemonic grammars of critique can ignore or underestimate the progressive possibilities for creating new ethical and political spaces in amongst the neoliberal canvas. In this paper we investigate the localism agenda using alternative interpretative grammars that are more open to the recognition of interstitial politics of resistance and experimentation that are springing up within, across, and beyond formations of the neoliberal. We analyse the broad framework of intentional localisms laid down by the Coalition government, and then point to four significant pathways by which more progressive articulations of localism have been emerging in amongst the neoliberal infrastructure. In so doing we seek to endorse and expand imaginations of political activism that accentuate an interstitial political sensibility that works strategically, and even subversively, with the tools at hand

Co-constituting neoliberalism: faith-based organisations, co-option, and resistance in the UK

The increasing prominence of faith-based organisations (FBOs) in providing welfare in the UK has typically been regarded as a by-product of neoliberalism, as the gaps left by shrinking public service provision and the contracting out of service delivery have been filled by these and other Third Sector organisations. In this way, FBOs have been represented as merely being co-opted as inexpensive resource providers into the wider governmentalities of neoliberal politics. In this paper we critically question how the concept of neoliberalism has been put to work in accounts of voluntary sector cooption, and argue instead for a recognition of different manifestations of secularism and religion, and their connections to changing political—economic and social contexts. Using the illustration of one particular FBO in the UK, we trace how neoliberalism can be co-constituted through the involvement of FBOs, which can offer various pathways of resistance in and through the pursuit of alternative philosophies of care and political activism

Welfare convergence, bureaucracy, and moral distancing at the food bank

This paper seeks to extend geographic thinking on the changing constitution of the UK welfare state, suggesting the need to supplement ideas of the “shadow state” with an analysis of the blurring of the bureaucratic practices through which welfare is now delivered by public, private and third sector providers alike. Focusing on the growing convergence of the bureaucratic practices of benefits officials and food bank organisations, we interrogate the production of moral distance that characterise both. We reveal the ideological values embedded in voucher and referral systems used by many food banks, and the ways in which these systems further stigmatise and exclude people in need of support. Contrasting these practices with those of a variety of “ethical insurgents”, we suggest that food banks are sites of both the further cementing and of challenge to the injustices of Britain's new welfare apparatus