Necroeconomics: How Necro Legacies Help Us Understand the Value of Death and the Protection of Life During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The paper offers an analysis of how three historical legacies shaped the context for responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in England. They are firstly, necrospeculation, the ability to turn destructiveness into profit and produce new capitalist value. The second is the legacy of thanatocracy, the enactment of mass and organised killing as an official policy of the state. The third necro legacy, social reproduction, is not just about violent death and accumulation, but also the state’s divestment of responsibility to women for the protection of life itself. What these violent legacies have in common as they entwine throughout history is the continuing relationship between property, accumulation, and disposable peoples, showing how economic and moral value is both captured and erased through abstract classifications of class, race, and gender. Bringing these legacies on a journey, we will see how they are modified and repeated in the present. Death during COVID-19 was used as an opportunity for speculation, consolidation of political power, and manipulation of the economy in the interests of the super-rich, government ministers, their friends, and the virus. True to neo-liberal philosophy, they "never let a serious crisis go to waste." Their predatory practices led to many people being callously disregarded, neglected, and unprotected, exposing those considered to be surplus to state and capital requirements. The pandemic revealed that the social contract was broken as the matter of state responsibility for protection of the people was transferred by the government to individuals. The paper will also show how some groups attempted to protect others and save lives

Young women and further education: a case study of young women's experience of caring courses in a local college

This is an ethnographic account of 83 young women on caring courses at a local Further Education college. It represents an attempt to understand and explain how these students experience the institutional parameters of Further Education. It also represents a more general attempt to understand the ways in which subjectivity is constructed in relation to structures of class and gender; and how, in this process, young women come necessarily to be implicated in constructing their own future subordination. The study starts by establishing its historical background; in particular the origins of the legacy of young women being prepared for a role outside the labour market. Then it proceeds to examine the organisation of Further Education, its modes of presenting knowledge, and the ways in which the institution is used to transmit ideology. This analysis divides broadly into two areas, representing on the one hand the role of the institution, and on the other, the student's responses to that role. Further Education is seen to contribute towards reproducing social fragmentation; naturalising the young women's status as domestic labourers; and making specific allocations of role and responsibility in this context. The student's responses are characterised by attempts to resist powerlessness, and to establish some degree of autonomy; but this response takes place within the frameworks prescribed by the institution and wider class and gender structures. In this respect the responses contribute towards producing a guilt culture, and the establishment of systems of self-surveillance, thus creating a whole pattern of behaviour that reaffirms subordination. In a wider context, these courses are indicative of recent State initiatives on pre-vocational education, and it is one of this study's main overall concerns to show the way that caring courses are part of a more general attempt by the State to restructure social relations

'Stuff it': Respectability and the voice of resistance in letter to brezhnev

Exploring Letter to Brezhnev through concepts of respectability as feminine cultural capital this article suggests that the film’s affective impulse stems from its representation of a female, working class experience under Thatcherism. This experience is articulated through two structures of feeling derived from the intersecting conventions of social realism, and the consumerist and romantic tropes of the ‘woman’s film’. Through this intersection the daily abjection of women through degrading work or unemployment is traced, whilst being counterpointed to the escapist pleasures of a ‘night out’ constituted through the spatial and aesthetic shifts of the narrative, and the feminisation of the ‘jack the lad’ staple of British screen culture. In this way, Letter to Brezhnev exposes the centrality of respectability to women’s social mobility, or lack of it, thus offering a powerful critique of Thatcherite ideologies and women’s position as primary consumers within them. The article also offers a corrective to existing scholarship that has focussed on cinematic representations of a crisis of masculinity under Thatcherism to the neglect of its corrosive impact on feminine respectability

In the Living Room: Second Screens and TV Audiences

© The Author(s) 2015. This article is based on a small pilot project exploring the role, function, and meanings of second screens and companion apps for TV audiences that is contextualized by existing academic audience research. This is mapped alongside industry research and academic debate about second screens. The results illustrate some disjunction between industry expectations of usage and viewers' everyday experiences. I argue that industries' tendency to conflate "viewer" with "fan" indicates a less than nuanced understanding of the television/companion app audience. Further, the lean forward/lean back binary applied to digital media users and television audiences respectively points to a problematic not addressed in much industry literature, while the respondents for this research indicate a complex interplay between the pleasures of viewing that incorporates the social and the personal with the second screen and the TV text

Structure of Class Feeling / Feeling of Class Structure:Laura Wade’s Posh and Katherine Soper’s Wish List

Theatre’s counter-hegemonic resistance to the “demonization of the working class” (Owen Jones) is the subject of this article. This resistance is analysed through case studies of two “class acts”: the elite Oxford boys in Laura Wade’s Posh (2010) and poverty-stricken youth in Katherine Soper’s Wish List (2016). My close reading of these two plays involves a reprise of Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling”: the conjugation of “structure” and “feeling” allows me to engage with and advocate a dual concern with systems of classification, and the affective, experiential (lived) dimension of being “classified.” Moving between the class-fuelled feelings of entitlement in Posh and those of alienation in Wish List, I elucidate how, under the UK’s regime of neoliberal austerity, the label “working class” has become “sticky” (Sara Ahmed) with disgust-making properties (Pierre Bourdieu). Overall, what emerges is a critical feeling for the UK as a class-divided nation and the urgent need to resist the entrenched classifying gaze of the neoliberalist imagination

Negotiating Closed Doors and Constraining Deadlines: The Potential of Visual Ethnography to Effectually Explore Private and Public Spaces of Motherhood and Parenting

Pregnancy and motherhood are increasingly subjected to surveillance, by medical professionals, the media and the general public; and discourses of ideal parenting are propagated alongside an admonishment of the perceived ‘failing’ maternal subject. However, despite this scrutiny, the mundane activities of parenting are often impervious to ethnographic forms of inquiry. Challenges for ethnographic researchers include the restrictions of becoming immersed in the private space of the home where parenting occurs, and an institutional structure that discourages exploratory and long-term fieldwork. This paper draws on four studies, involving 34 participants, which explored their journeys into the space of parenthood and their everyday experiences. The studies all employed forms of visual ethnography including artefacts, photo-elicitation, timelines, collage and sandboxing. The paper argues that visual methodologies can enable access to unseen aspects of parenting, and engender forms of temporal extension, which can help researchers to disrupt the restrictions of tightly time bounded projects

‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley (BBC1 2014-2016)

This article examines Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016) in the context of recent feminist attempts to theorise the idea of a maternal subject. Happy Valley, a police series set in an economically disadvantaged community in West Yorkshire, has been seen as expanding the genre of British social realism, in its focus on strong Northern women, by giving it ‘a female voice’ (Gorton, 2016: 73). I argue that its challenge is more substantial. Both the tradition of British social realism on which the series draws, and the neoliberal narratives of the family which formed the discursive context of its production, I argue, are founded on a social imaginary in which the mother is seen as responsible for the production of the selves of others, but cannot herself be a subject. The series itself, however, places at its centre an active, articulate, mobile and angry maternal subject. In so doing, it radically contests both a tradition of British social realism rooted in male nostalgia and more recent neoliberal narratives of maternal guilt and lifestyle choice. It does this through a more fundamental contestation: of the wider cultural narratives about selfhood and the maternal that underpin both. Its reflective maternal subject, whose narrative journey involves acceptance of an irrecoverable loss, anger and guilt as a crucial aspect of subjectivity, and who embodies an ethics of relationality, is a figure impossible in conventional accounts of subject and nation. She can be understood, however, in terms of recent feminist theories of the maternal

Aficionados, academics, and Danzón expertise: exploring hierarchies in popular music knowledge production

Amateur scholars, such as aficionados, fans, intellectuals, are rarely valued in the twenty-first-century academy, despite their often-encyclopedic knowledge. In this paper, I focus on Mexican aficionados of the popular Cuban music danzón to explore how these mostly older men manage social contexts where they are often marginalized. Drawing on Bourdieu, I examine how danzón aficionados negotiate their field of expertise by employing overlapping strategies: accumulating myriad "facts" and "truths", creating the possibility of ignorance in others, and competing for hegemonic masculine capital. I analyze danzón aficionados' relationships with musicians and dancers, consider power dynamics between these aficionados and academics, and draw on Léon and Romero to discuss relationships between regional and hegemonic scholarship more broadly. I argue that beyond reflexivity and criticism, collective activism is required to reconfigure value systems and symbolic economies, and to fight institutional pressures to reproduce existing power structure