The white essential subject: race,ethnicity, and the Irish in post-war Britain

This article focuses on the history of Irish migrants in Birmingham in an attempt to enhance historical understanding of race, ethnicity and ‘whiteness’ in post-war Britain. To do so, it will look at two Birmingham histories: the Young Christian Workers’ Association’s report on the Welfare of Irish migrants in 1951, and anti-Irish violence in the aftermath of the Birmingham Pub Bombings of 1974. It will consider the extent to which Irish immigrants were victims of racism, what this meant in terms of discrimination and identity, and, in particular, how Irish experiences corresponded to that of black and Asian migrants.     

Introducing inclusive tourism

ABSTACT

Tourism is often understood and experienced as an exclusive activity. In supporting the concept of inclusive tourism, this volume seeks to counter that tendency by seeking out ways in which those who are typically marginalized by, or excluded from tourism can be brought into the industry in ways that directly benefit them, or that they can gain more control over tourism. This introduction to the special issue first presents a conceptual article that defines the concept of inclusive tourism and discusses seven different elements, which may constitute lines of inquiry in investigations of tourism's inclusiveness. It then presents five empirical articles that illustrate some of the ways in which an inclusive tourism approach might inform discussion of the potentials and limitations for tourism to generate wider social and economic benefits. The examples provided are from a wide range of geographical contexts, from Cambodia to Australia, Sweden, Turkey and Spain. Inclusive tourism is offered here as both an analytical concept and an aspirational ideal. We do not ever envisage minimum standards for inclusive tourism. We rather hope that there will be a restless quest to find ways to include new actors and new places in tourism on terms that are equitable and sustainable.     

Failing to live up to the promise: the politics of equal pay in ‘new’ workplace and industrial relations institutions

Workplace and industrial relations regulations are key sites for policy intervention to address Australia's gender pay gap, which, at 15.3 per cent, is almost as large as it was in 1997. In both the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) and the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 (Cth) the goal of equal pay has a more central place than it did in predecessor legislation. In particular, the Fair Work Act has the potential to deliver more gender-equitable wage structures through addressing systemic gender-based undervaluation at the industry level. Adopting a feminist institutional approach this article examines equal pay policy in the operations of workplace and industrial relations regulation to ask why, despite some recent successes, this potential appears unlikely to be realised.     

Australian bicameralism as semi-parliamentarism: patterns of majority formation in 29 democracies

The article analyses the type of bicameralism we find in Australia as a distinct executive-legislative system – a hybrid between parliamentary and presidential government – which we call ‘semi-parliamentary government’. We argue that this hybrid presents an important and underappreciated alternative to pure parliamentary government as well as presidential forms of the power-separation, and that it can achieve a certain balance between competing models or visions of democracy. We specify theoretically how the semi-parliamentary separation of powers contributes to the balancing of democratic visions and propose a conceptual framework for comparing democratic visions. We use this framework to locate the Australian Commonwealth, all Australian states and 22 advanced democratic nation-states on a two-dimensional empirical map of democratic patterns for the period from 1995 to 2015.     

Police–public relations in transition in Antwerp, 1840s–1914

This article examines how police–public relations have evolved during the nineteenth-century expansion of formal policing. Following recent critiques of the ‘state monopolization thesis’, it dismisses the idea of a ‘policeman-state’ progressively assuming dominion over the governance of crime, generating vicious antagonism between police and public, and effectively coercing the latter into obedience. In order to chart changes in police–public relations across the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the analysis draws on Antwerp police statistics from 1842 until 1913. It assumes that movements in different types of offences reflect the initiative of different actors and also constitute a valuable index of conflicts between police and public. The article argues that although police activity in Antwerp did significantly increase towards the end of the nineteenth century, priorities in crime control were not merely dictated from ‘above’ (the police and authorities) but also delivered from ‘below’ (the people). It shows how police interventions were shaped by shifting policy concerns, by the interests of different urban interest groups, and by the practical constraints of police work. Finally, it counters the idea of a repressive police disciplining a hostile public with evidence of growing public use of the police and of complex popular attitudes towards the ‘blue locusts’.     

Stalin’s humanitarian government: class,child homelessness and state security in a historical perspective (1930s–40s)

Informed by Didier Fassin’s concept of humanitarian government, this article reveals a distinct pattern of secret care provisions imposed under Stalin by the secret police and its successor agencies (NKVD, MVD) first to the peasant children displaced by class war and the famine of 1932–33, and then to the children made homeless by the Great Terror and the 1940s’ national deportations. The article also identifies the under-researched reception centres as crucial sites for both administering emergency assistance and establishing the social classification necessary to apply these discriminatory measures. Affected by the decreasing faith in their possible socialist rehabilitation and lack of any official display of compassion, these children’s lives appeared even less worthy of saving in the course of major emergencies. These findings challenge the official Soviet view of the existence of a universal childhood worth protecting, which guided the first socialist country’s intervention to save other children nationally and internationally.     

Views,use and reception of visualisations of development proposals impacting cultural heritage

Visualisations of land-use projects have become an important part of the planning process. Using a survey of heritage professionals’ attitudes towards visualisations as a starting point, this article addresses tensions between the expressed usefulness of visualisations and critical attitudes towards the lack of ‘objectivity’ of visual representation and the risk of manipulation for strategic purposes. Moving from the survey, the article discusses how visual representations of development proposals became part of a Norwegian public dispute over the expansion of a shopping centre in a historic town. Furthermore, our aim is to introduce a social semiotic approach for analysing visualisations at historic sites. Finally, we discuss some theoretical implications of negotiating visualisations, with emphasis on the recent debate about representational and non-representational theories in heritage studies.     

Zopilotes,Alacranes, y Hormigas (Vultures,Scorpions, and Ants): Animal Metaphors as Organizational Politics in a Nicaraguan Garbage Crisis

While scholars frequently frame conflicts over urban waste in terms of a politics of infrastructure, this article frames such conflicts in terms of a politics of organization. In 2008, self‐employed recyclers in and around Managua, Nicaragua blockaded local dumps in an effort to secure rights to scavenge for resellable material. Over the course of this “garbage crisis”, a material and semiotic entanglement of human labor organization with animal ecology became politically salient. At different points, recyclers were compared to ants (hormigas), vultures (zopilotes), and scorpions (alacranes). State officials, NGOs, and recyclers themselves used these animal metaphors to describe the organization of waste collection. Drawing on theories of value from political ecology and economic anthropology, as well as analysis of the deployment of these “organic” metaphors, we outline an “organizational politics” of urban waste.     

The Abstraction of Care: What Work Counts?

Nurses provide essential health care labor, but their work, a mix of caregiving and clinical expertise, is often undervalued and unacknowledged by health care administrators and the policies and practices that govern health care more broadly. Based on interviews with nurses working in the New York metropolitan area and through pairing feminist political economy with literature on abstraction and politics of the possible, I show that the ways in which nurses’ work is measured creates a value hierarchy of tasks. Examining various tools of measurement, I argue that methods for measuring work are rooted in an historical and continuous hierarchy of what counts as work and what has value. For nurses, these processes obscure the essential care work they perform. I argue that bringing an explicit politics of social reproduction to the politics of measuring and accounting for work makes visible necessary and often‐obscured tasks, spaces, and social relations.