Unravelling the “Thin Blue Line”: Policing as an Engine of Inequality

This paper argues that policing be understood as a creative social force that reproduces important dimensions of earlier iterations of the colour line. The paper advances this argument by integrating findings from two distinct research projects: the first on the household financial losses that follow arrest by immigration officials in Tucson, AZ; and the second focusing on the everyday costs of policing and carceral supervision absorbed by residents of Philadelphia, PA. Together, data from these sites illuminate how exposure to policing exhausts emotional and material resources from expansive family and community networks of care and support. To theorise the connection between financial dispossession and the dispossession of future opportunity, we draw on a heuristic reading of the “thin blue line” symbol. We conclude by suggesting a need for closer attention to how contemporary state interventions drive patterns of dispossession and vulnerability that accumulate across various scales, sites, rhythms, and collectivities.     

Regionalökonomische Bedeutung kleiner Wallfahrtsorte

Today pilgrimage is experiencing an increasing interest, although motives are notable changing. Sites along pilgrim routes normally profit in an economically way. But until today regional economic effects of even very small pilgrimage sites are underexplored. Therefore economic impulses of the pilgrimage site in Biberbach (Bavaria) were identified using interviews and calculations. According to that the 10,000 visitors per year generate nearly 30,000 € gross turnover and 0.5 jobs. So even small pilgrimage sites can obviously produce a notable increase of local EVA.     

Injuries on a skull from the Ancient Bronze Age (Ballabio,Lecco, Italy): a natural or an anthropic origin?

This paper discusses the results of the analysis of a female skull from a collective burial dated to the Ancient Bronze Age in Italy (Ballabio, LC). A virtual restoration and 3D reconstruction was also produced from the digitalized skull to complete the damaged parts and to recreate the facial appearance of this young adult female from the Bronze Age. The skull shows clear evidence of post-mortem modifications, as some series of scraping marks on the external cranial vault cross the parietal bones longitudinally. The contemporaneous presence of taphonomic linear marks on the skull and periostitis on the frontal bone, as well as the provenance of the specimen from a secondary burial (a typical funerary habit documented in Italy during the Copper Age and Ancient Bronze Age), makes it difficult to interpret the case (scalping, surgery, or ritual practice linked to secondary burial). The advanced methods used to analyse the skull surface allowed us to discriminate intentional marks from modifications due to other taphonomic processes and to determine the timing of their formation (peri- or post-mortem). The possibility that the scraping marks are related to a ritual practice, conducted during the individual's life (with specific symbolic or social value) or after death or at the moment of secondary burial, is discussed.     

Unsettling Migrant Reintegration: The Serial Risk-Taking of Returning Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to Cordillera,Philippines

In 2017, the Philippine government boosted its campaign on Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) reintegration, a set of programmes designed to aid returning Filipino labour migrants. In this paper, I examine migrant reintegration through the case of returned migrants to the province of Benguet, Philippines. Rather than use “sustainability of return” as main focus of assessment, I foreground instead the historical geographies undergirding the current reiteration of this migration policy. By doing so, I demonstrate how the “gambling” practices of returned migrants can be read as not an easy acquiescence to the neoliberal imperative for self-entrepreneurship encouraged by the Philippine state. In highlighting gambling as an embodied strategy emerging from and through imperial histories, I argue that migrant reintegration gets revealed as rehearsal of certain colonial logics that have oriented certain peoples to the labour of serial risk taking for survival. Close attention to return migrants’ gambling practices raises urgent questions regarding the relentless push for entrepreneurship as development solution.     

Lies, damn lies, and Manchester's recruiting statistics: degeneration as an "urban legend" in Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Few historians have attempted to discuss British medicine, health and welfare policies, or the biological sciences around 1900 without due reference to the concept of degeneration. Most tie public concern with degeneration to a specific set of military recruiting figures, which stated that of 11,000 would-be volunteers in Manchester, 8,000 had to be turned away due to physical defects. Further, most histories point out that these figures had a direct influence on the formation of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1904. With its absolute denial of hereditary decline, the 1904 Report acts as a dénouement of degenerationist fears in Britain. No historian has sought to contextualize these recruiting figures: Where did they come from? How did Manchester react? What role did that city play in the subsequent 1904 Report? Far from being the epitome of urban decay, the 1904 Report repeatedly hails Manchester as a glowing example of innovative urban reform. This article contextualizes the recruiting figures and explores how Manchester had been tackling the three key problems of Physical Deterioration-diet, exercise, and alcohol-for thirty years prior to the 1904 Report. By discussing Manchester, a new understanding of degeneration is outlined; as slogan, rhetorical tool, and urban legend, degeneration was largely feminized and domesticated. Military/masculine problems such as the recruiting figures were the exception, not the rule.     

Lifetimes of Disposability and Surplus Entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio,Manila

Working in collaboration with Migrante International and drawing on testimony of residents in the remittance‐dependent, migrant‐sending community of Bagong Barrio in Caloocan City in Metro Manila, Philippines, we examine the systematic production of lifetimes of disposability that drives labour migration across the generations. The closure of factories and contractualisation of work in the 1980s created the conditions in which labour migration is not a choice but a necessity. Diligent use of remittances to pay for the education of their children in many cases has produced a new generation of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), and investment in housing often is another route to OFW status. Alongside this narrative of ongoing precarity, we listen closely to the testimony of residents for ways of living that are both subsumed within and somewhat excessive to accounts that might render their lives as merely waste or wasted.     

Who does the work in sustainable households? A time and gender analysis in New South Wales,Australia

Households in the affluent West have become an important target of government and NGO campaigns to encourage more environmentally sustainable behaviours, but there has been little research into the gender implications of such policies. This article investigates the role of gender and time in the sustainability practices of six heterosexual households with young children, committed participants in the Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge programme in 2009. Women spent more total time on sustainable practices, and did so more often. Men's contributions related mostly to gardening and transport, in longer blocks of time. In these households, sustainability became a highly gendered practice because of the different roles in homemaking. Women resisted constructions of themselves as being closer to nature, and shouldered expectations of sustainability as part of their roles as mothers and household managers. They experienced time as overlapping and fragmented, with no distinction between work and leisure. Men contributed to sustainable practices mainly through activities understood as leisure, in longer blocks of time. Our temporality lens also illustrates the gendered ways that old practices become deroutinised and new practices reroutinised. While men were often responsible for the labour and upfront time required to start or research a project, the responsibility of everyday implementation and habit-changing commonly fell to women. These findings illustrate how gendered analyses help identify both opportunities for, and constraints against, change towards sustainability. Opportunities include the strong connections between both mothers' and fathers' understanding of good parenting and the importance they attach to household sustainability. Constraints include the temporal challenges faced by households, and how these interact with wider structural and labour roles.