Long-Term Imprisonment in Northern Ireland:Psychological or Political Survival?

The chapter reviews the literature on the affects of long-term imprisonment with a focus on concepts of psychological survival, learned helplessness and institutionalization. It then discusses trends in imprisonment in Northern Ireland and the exceptionally high proportion of prisoners serving life sentences. Through interviews with prisoners and their relatives, a critique of the literature is made in terms of the failure to take account of cases of collective prisoner organization and strong political motivation.

Participatory Sonic Arts: towards a socially engaged art of sound in the everyday (The Som da Maré Project)

Participatory and socially engaged art practices have, for a couple of decades, emerged a myriad of aesthetic and methodological strategies across different media. These are artistic practices that have a primary interest in participation, affecting social dynamics, dialogue and at times political activism. Nato Thompson in “Living Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011” surveys these
practices, which range from theatre to urban planning, visual art to healthcare. Linked to notions such as relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 1998), community art and public art, socially engaged art often focuses on the development of a sense of ownership by the part of participants. If an artist is working truly collaboratively with participants and addressing the reality of a particular community, the long-term effect of a project lies in the process of engagement as well as in the artwork itself. Projects by New York based artist Pablo Helguera, for example, use different media to engage with social inequalities through participative action while rejecting the notion of art for art sake.

“Socially engaged art functions by attaching itself to subjects and problems that normally belong to other disciplines, moving them temporarily into a space of ambiguity. It is this temporary snatching away of subjects into the realm of art-making that brings new insights to a particular problem or condition and in turn makes it visible to other disciplines.” (Helguera, 2011)

Socially engaged practices develop the notion of artwork about or by a community, to work of a community. In this chapter we address how socially engaged, participatory approaches can form a context for the sonic arts, arguably less explored than practices such as theatre and performance art. The use of sound is clearly present in a wide range of socially engaged work (e.g. Helguera’s “Aelia Media” enabling a nomadic radio station in Bologna or Maria Andueza “Immigrant Sounds – Res(on)Art (Stockholm)” exploring ways of sonically resonating a city, or Sue MacCauley’s “The Housing Project” addressing ways of representing the views of urban dwellers on public scape through sound art. It is nevertheless rare to encounter projects which take our experience of sound in the everyday as a trigger for community social engagement in a participatory context.
We address concepts and methodologies behind the project Som da Maré, a participatory sonic arts project in the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro.

Economic Ideas and the Political Construction of the Financial Crash of 2008

This article is a short introduction to a special section on economic ideas and the political construction of the financial crash. It begins by explaining why economic ideas and the politics of appeals to certain ideas are so integral to the historical significance of the crash of 2008 and the question of whether it can be considered a crash at all. The first section covers the literature on ideas and economic crisis. The second section highlights that the contribution of the special section is to engage in a stock taking exercise of the empirical and conceptual patterns concerning the politics of ideational change underway in the areas of: comparative fiscal policy; monetary policy and Euro zone debt management; capital controls; and financial and securities market regulation and standard setting. The final section outlines the structure of this special section and content of the individual articles.

Raymond Geuss’ radicalization of realism in political theory

Raymond Geuss has been viewed as one of the figureheads of the recent debates about realism in political theory. This interpretation, however, depends on a truncated understanding of his work of the past 30 years. I will offer the first sustained engagement with this work (in English and German) which allows understanding his realism as a project for reorienting political theory, particularly the relationship between political theory and politics. I interpret this reorientation as a radicalization of realismin political theory through the combination of the emphasis on the critical purpose of political theory and the provision of practical, contextual orientation. Their compatibility depends on Geuss’ understanding of criticism as negative, of power as ‘detoxified’ and of the critical purchase of political theory as based on the diagnostic engagement with its context. This radicalization particularly challenges the understanding of how political theory relates to its political context.

Resilience

Over the past decade the concept of ‘resilience’ has been mobilised across an increasingly wide range of policy arenas. For example, it has featured prominently within recent discussions on the nature of warfare, the purpose of urban and regional planning, the effectiveness of development policies, the intent of welfare reform and the stability of the international financial system. The term’s origins can be traced back to the work of the ecologist Crawford S. Holling and his formulation of a science of complexity. This paper reflects on the origins of these ideas and their travels from the field of natural resource management, which it now dominates, to contemporary social practices and policy arenas. It reflects on the ways in which a lexicon of complex adaptive systems, grounded in an epistemology of limited knowledge and uncertain futures, seeks to displace ongoing ‘dependence’ on professionals by valorising self-reliance and responsibility as techniques to be applied by subjects in the making of the resilient self. In so doing, resilience is being mobilised to govern a wide range of threats and sources of uncertainty, from climate change, financial crises and terrorism, to the sustainability of development, the financing of welfare and providing for an aging population. As such, ‘resilience’ risks becoming a measure of its subjects’ ‘fitness’ to survive in what are pre-figured as natural, turbulent orders of things.

Exposure to Political Violence in Northern Ireland and Outcome of First Episode Psychosis

The impact of political violence on individuals presenting with an episode of first episode psychosis has not been examined. Individuals were assessed for exposure to political violence in Northern Ireland (the “Troubles”) by asking for a response to 2 questions: one asked about the impact of violence “on your area”; the second about the impact of violence “on you or your family’s life.” The participants were separated into 2 groups (high and low impact) for each question. Symptom profiles and rates of substance misuse were compared across the groups at baseline and at 3-year follow up. Of the 178 individuals included in the study 66 (37.1%) reported a high impact of the “Troubles” on their life and 81 (45.5%) a high impact of the “Troubles” on their area. There were no significant differences in symptom profile or rates of substance misuse between high and low groups at presentation. At 3-year follow-up high impact of the “Troubles” on life was associated with higher Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS) Total (P = .01), PANSS-Positive (P < .05), and PANSS-General (P < .01) scores and lower global assessment of functioning disability (P < .05) scores, after adjusting for confounding factors. Impact of the “Troubles” on area was not associated with differences in symptom outcomes. This finding adds to the evidence that outcomes in psychosis are significantly impacted by environmental factors and suggests that greater attention should be paid to therapeutic strategies designed to address the impact of trauma.