Enforcing precariousness: a comparative analysis of the limitations placed on the legal status of refugees

This thesis focuses on the manner in which the EU, the UK, and Canada respond to and engage with the refugee’s movement from a temporary to a more permanent legal status in the state. It is noted that this transition is increasingly problematized. A trend is noted in response to this among the jurisdictions examined, to exceptionalise refugee status through acts of legal categorisation and separation. These categorisations represent an attempt to re-assert control over refugees who arrived to the state in a spontaneous manner. I argue that this categorisation and fragmentation of refugee status is another means of managing life in the state and ultimately excluding refugees within the state. Refugees therefore experience a contradictory response to their presence. While they are continually reminded of the temporary nature of their legal status in the state, they are still required to demonstrate a willingness to integrate in to the host society. Their behaviour in the state is something that is once again recalled by the decision makers who determine whether they should ultimately be able to access citizenship status. In this thesis, I argue that in order to navigate a route to citizenship, the refugee must respond to the constant re-framing and re-contextualisation of her status in the state of asylum. As the thesis observes, this raises broader questions about the nature of citizenship and belonging

Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990

This study, "Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990," offers a new perspective on the historical origins of the modern prison industrial complex, sexual violence in working-class culture, and the ways in which race shaped the prison experience. This study joins new scholarship that reperiodizes the Civil Rights era while also considering how violence and radicalism shaped the civil rights struggle. It places the criminal justice system at the heart of both an older racial order and within a prison-made civil rights movement that confronted the prison's power to deny citizenship and enforce racial hierarchies. By charting the trajectory of the civil rights movement in Texas prisons, my dissertation demonstrates how the internal struggle over rehabilitation and punishment shaped civil rights, racial formation, and the political contest between liberalism and conservatism. This dissertation offers a close case study of Texas, where the state prison system emerged as a national model for penal management. The dissertation begins with a hopeful story of reform marked by an apparently successful effort by the State of Texas to replace its notorious 1940s plantation/prison farm system with an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business oriented Sun Belt state. But this reputation of competence and efficiency obfuscated the reality of a brutal system of internal prison management in which inmates acted as guards, employing coercive means to maintain control over the prisoner population. The inmates whom the prison system placed in charge also ran an internal prison economy in which money, food, human beings, reputations, favors, and sex all became commodities to be bought and sold. I analyze both how the Texas prison system managed to maintain its high external reputation for so long in the face of the internal reality and how that reputation collapsed when inmates, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, revolted. My dissertation shows that this inmate Civil Rights rebellion was a success in forcing an end to the existing system but a failure in its attempts to make conditions in Texas prisons more humane. The new Texas prison regime, I conclude, utilized paramilitary practices, privatized prisons, and gang-related warfare to establish a new system that focused much more on law and order in the prisons than on the legal and human rights of prisoners. Placing the inmates and their struggle at the heart of the national debate over rights and "law and order" politics reveals an inter-racial social justice movement that asked the courts to reconsider how the state punished those who committed a crime while also reminding the public of the inmates' humanity and their constitutional rights.

Bildungsbericht Dessau-Roßlau 2013

Mit dem vorliegenden kommunalen Bildungsbericht 2013 legt die Stadt Dessau-Roßlau nach 2011 zum zweiten Mal eine Bestandsaufnahme der Bildungslandschaft Dessau-Roßlau vor. Damit ist die Bildungsberichterstattung im Programm „Lernen vor Ort“ zu einem wichtigen Baustein und Planungsinstrument geworden. Der Bildungsbericht ist gleichzeitig eine Einladung an alle Interessierten durch die konstruktive Auseinandersetzung mit den Ergebnissen die nächsten Schritte in eine zukunftsfähige Bildungslandschaft mitzugestalten. (DIPF/Orig.)

When the shift hits the critical fan: a Foucauldian analysis

In the past 15 years in the UK, the state has acquired powers, which mark a qualitative shift in its relationship to higher education. Since the introduction and implementation of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 and the Higher Education Act 2004, a whole raft of changes have occurred which include the following: Widening participation; the development of interdisciplinary, experiential and workplace-based learning focused on a theory-practice dialogue; quality assurance; and new funding models which encompass public and private partnerships. The transformation of higher education can be placed in the context of New Labour’s overall strategies for overarching reform of public services, as set out in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit’s discussion paper The UK Government’s Approach to Public Service Reform (2006). An optimistic view of changes to higher education is that they simultaneously obey democratic and economic imperatives. There is an avowed commitment through the widening participation agenda to social inclusion and citizenship, and to providing the changing skills base necessary for the global economy. A more cynical view is that, when put under critical scrutiny, as well as being emancipatory, in some senses these changes can be seen to mobilise regulatory and disciplinary practices. This paper reflects on what kinds of teaching and learning are promoted by the new relationship between the state and the university. It argues that, whilst governmental directives for innovations and transformations in teaching and learning allegedly empower students and put their interests at the centre, reforms can also be seen to consist of supervisory and controlling mechanisms with regard both to our own practices as teachers and the knowledge/ learning we provide for the students.

Priority questions to shape the marine and coastal policy research agenda in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom (UK) and European Union policy is rapidly developing to meet international targets for the sustainable use and protection of the marine environment. To inform this process, research needs to keep pace with these changes and research questions must be focused on providing robust scientific evidence. Thirty four priority research questions within six broad themes were identified by delegates who attended the 1st marine and coastal policy Forum, hosted by the Centre for Marine and Coastal Policy Research at Plymouth University in June 2011. The priority questions formed through this research are timely and reflect the pace and change of marine policy in the UK in response to international, European and national policy drivers. Within the data theme, the majority of questions seek to find improved procedures to manage and use data effectively. Questions related to governance focus on how existing policies should be implemented. The marine conservation questions focus entirely upon implementation and monitoring of existing policy. Questions related to ecosystem services focus on research to support the conceptual links between ecosystem services, ecosystem function, and marine management. Questions relating to marine citizenship are fundamental questions about the nature of societal engagement with the sea. Finally, the marine planning questions focus upon understanding the general approaches to be taken to marine planning rather than its detailed implementation. The questions that have emerged from this process vary in scale, approach and focus. They identify the interdisciplinary science that is currently needed to enable the UK to work towards delivering its European and international commitments to achieve the sustainable use and protection of the marine environment

Life Around the Turbines

Life around the Turbines is an outreach project developed by the Marine Biological Association of the UK (MBA) funded by COWRIE (Collaborative Offshore Wind Research into the Environment). The project was designed to promote the need for renewable energy, raise awareness of marine biodiversity and generate discussions about offshore wind farms particularly with school children around Great Britain. The project has run from 2008 – 2014 and has involved workshops with schools all around Great Britain; production of online resources and a series of training events and tools for marine educators. All of the resources and workshops were developed to correlate with the national curricula for England, Scotland and Wales and cover a range of topics including science, citizenship and technology. Combining charismatic marine wildlife with technology and interactive, hands-on workshop activities has proved a successful and popular combination, received well by students and teachers. We present the methods of engagement used and some of the information received through a basic activity evaluation process. We will also share information about how conference participants can obtain and utilise free resources to support their own outreach and teaching at www.mba.ac.uk/education.

Abortion and Nation: The Politics of Reproduction in Contemporary Ireland

Abortion politics are contentious and divisive in many parts of the world, but nowhere more so than in Ireland. Abortion and Nation examines the connection between abortion politics and hegemonic struggles over national identity and the nation-state in the Irish Republic. Situating the abortion question in the global context of human rights politics, as well as international social movements, Lisa Smyth analyses the formation and transformation of abortion politics in Ireland from the early 1980s to the present day. She considers whether or not the shifting connections between morality, rights and nationhood promise a new era of gender equality in the context of nation-state citizenship.
The book provides a new sociological framework through which the significance of conflict over abortion and reproductive freedom is connected to conflict over national identity. It also offers a distinctive in-depth consideration of the connection between gender and nationhood, particularly in terms of its impact on women's status as citizens; within the nation-state; within the European Union; and as members of a global civil society.

The “re-socialization” of Gypsy women in the literacy courses aimed to the recipients of the Social Integration Revenue Policy of the Region of Madrid

This article studies the gender values that are promoted both in the literacy courses for gypsy women beneficiaries of the Social Integration Revenue Policy of the Region of Madrid and in the events that are organized for this group by public institutions and NGOs. The process of “socialization” that occurs in the educative groups for Gypsy women is focused on constructing an image of what it is to be a “Gypsy modern woman”. Through multiple mechanisms and discursive techniques a specific conception of gender equality is transmitted in these educative spaces. In addition to this, Gypsy women are continually urged to assume certain values and social practices (of gender identity, of "citizenship", of parenting, etc..), while an archetype of "Gypsy Woman" which condenses powerful stereotypes and prejudices about the "Gypsy culture" and the gender relations characteristics of this group is constructed.

Welfare Regimes and “progressive” governments in Latin America: The cases of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia

Several authors have applied the concept of Welfare Regimens for studying social policy in Latin America (Esping-Andersen, 1993 and 2000). Among others, Martínez Franzoni (2007) develops a typology, with fi eld work is at the turn of the millennium, and establishes three categories: State-productivist regime, state-protectionist and family orientated. Most countries in the region are placed in the latter category. The hypothesis of this article argues that with the emergence of governments considered “left” or “progressive” in several countries of the region from the late ‘90s and, more decisively, in 2000’, the map of welfare regimes models could have mutated substantively. The nationally transformative experiences are different (various socio-economic realities and political action in which they are located exists) but they have several contact points that can be summarized in a greater state intervention in different areas previously closed to their operating and recovery of important functions of welfare and care of the population by the government. The paper discusses with an exploratory and descriptive approach the welfare schemes that would shape in three countries that have constitutionalized the change from the neoliberal paradigm: Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.

Welfare Effort and Poverty from the Monetary and Capabilities Approach: A Cross-Country Analysis in Latin American and the Caribbean (1990-2010)

There is abundant empirical evidence on the negative relationship between welfare effort and poverty. However, poverty indicators traditionally used have been representative of the monetary approach, excluding its multidimensional reality from the analysis. Using three regression techniques for the period 1990-2010 and controlling for demographic and cyclical factors, this paper examines the relationship between social spending per capita —as the indicator of welfare effort— and poverty in up to 21 countries of the region. The proportion of the population with an income below its national basic basket of goods and services (PM1) and the proportion of population with an income below 50% of the median income per capita (PM2) were the two poverty indicators considered from the monetarist approach to measure poverty. From the capability approach the proportion of the population with food inadequacy (PC1) and the proportion of the population without access to improved water sources or sanitation facilities (PC2) were used. The fi ndings confi rm that social spending is actually useful to explain changes in poverty (PM1, PC1 and PC2), as there is a high negative and signifi cant correlation between the variables before and after controlling for demographic and cyclical factors. In two regression techniques, social spending per capita did not show a negative relationship with the PM2. Countries with greater welfare effort for the period 1990-2010 were not necessarily those with the lowest level of poverty. Ultimately social spending per capita was more useful to explain changes in poverty from the capability approach.

Unraveling EU Policies: the ““Common Basic Principles”” and the ““European Integration Fund”” as a technology of government

this paper is about EU “soft policies” on immigrant integration. It analyzes the “Common Basic Principles” (CBPs) and the “European Integration Fund” (EIF), two devices that have been recently established within this framework. It adopts the theoretical perspective of the “anthropology of policy” and “governmentality studies”. It shows the context of birth of the aforementioned devices, as well as their functioning and the assessment done by the actors implied in the elaboration/implementation/evaluation of the related policies. It is based both on documentary research as well as direct observation and interviews done to the actors implied. It concludes that the PBC and the EIF should be considered as a “technology of government”, that strives to align the conduct of the actors with the governmental aims, as well as it produces specific practices and knowledge. It also underlines an intrinsic feature of many policies: their “congenital failure”, since they are (often) disputed and resignified by situated actors, who are embedded in asymmetrical power relations.