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Remaking the Financial Infrastructure of the City of London
Get PDFIn the political economy of finance, the infrastructure of the material environment has tended to be underexamined, with only cursory attention given to how new technologies are enabled by planning decisions and built into the fabric of working spaces. Yet the production of certain infrastructure systems enables some financial centers to have a competitive advantage over others. This chapter responds to this omission by exploring how the City of London, a core hub for financial services, prioritized the remaking of its infrastructure as a way to rebuild and extend its power. The general coverage of infrastructure in respect to the City remains sparse – a troubling analytical gap when one considers that infrastructure is always an enduring question for government and private sector agents. The chapter probes the political economy of infrastructural dynamics from the 1980s to the present, a prominent period in which the City grappled with manifold commercial, technological, regulatory, and cultural changes. The argument uncovers how different groups of professional players – major firms, local government agencies, property owners, architects, and developers – interacted in ways which produced a significant transformation in the infrastructural experience of the City
‘Fighting him’: Following distress in hostile housing regimes
Get PDFThis study explores the psychological impacts of the UK housing crisis among a collective of Somali women in Birmingham. We build a framework from anthropological theories of social distress, applied through a participatory methodology consisting of housing biographies and therapeutic workshops. Research was conducted between June 2022-December 2023. Our findings reveal the cumulative forms of distress generated through poor housing, eviction and placement in temporary forms of accommodation. Such distress was articulated in multiple genres which spanned somatic, social reproductive, bureaucratic and psychological harms. Participants pushed back on biomedical categories of mental ill-health in relation to housing distress. We argue that hostile migratory contexts contour the expression of suffering generated through poor housing, particularly in relation to women's mental health. We suggest that ethnographic approaches can lead us beyond social determinants models, revealing forms of distress which accumulate across and within policy domains. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.
Review of Romil and Jugal , Web Series (Directed by Nupur Asthana), 2017
No full textPerformance Revie
Morphosyntactic borrowing in closely related varieties: “False cognates” in Swahili
No full textThe paper examines contact-induced morphosyntactic change in Swahili, where material which had historically been lost is ‘reintroduced’ through contact with closely related languages which have retained the original feature. The paper discusses three examples of these morphosyntactic ‘false cognates’: diminutive marking, habitual marking and demonstrative forms, and shows that if it were not from the evidence from different diachronic stages and varieties of Swahili, these forms could well be analysed as inherited from Proto-Bantu. The paper contributes to our understanding of the historical development of Swahili, patterns of variation found in Swahili and Bantu languages more widely, as well as the importance of comparative evidence for the unravelling of historical and contemporary relations between closely related linguistic varieties
Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America? Why History Should Count
Get PDFThe Trump Administration changing the Gulf’s indigenous name demonstrates the continuing control over political institutions by the descendants of European settler populations – illegal migrants, in today’s western parlance – who continue to seek to erase the actual crimes of their Euro-supremacist ancestors’ genocidal theft of that extra-European land – and sea
How unexploded bombs cause environmental damage – and why climate change exacerbates the problem
No full textGrassroots Pan-Africanism: Border Lives and Transnational Belonging in the Lake Chad Basin
Get PDFThis article explores how grassroots Pan-Africanism is lived and practiced in the Lake Chad Basin (LCB), a region where borders function both as instruments of state control and as conduits for transnational connection. Drawing on interviews across Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon, it traces how everyday cross-border interactions sustain regional solidarities that blur the boundaries of national identity. Rather than framing African borders solely as rigid enclosures or colonial relics, the article approaches them as fluid sites of negotiation—simultaneously regulating mobility and enabling forms of belonging that extend beyond the state. By foregrounding the lived experiences of borderland communities, it reframes Pan-Africanism as an everyday, improvisational practice rooted in mobility, resilience, and mutual dependence. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on African integration, showing how regionalism is not only imagined by states but enacted from below
Review: Subhashini Kaligotla, Shiva’s Waterfront Temples: Architects and Their Audiences in Medieval India (Yale University Press, 2022).
Get PDFSymbolic Power
No full textStudying symbolic power is a commitment of international political sociology (IPS). This chapter analyzes the roots of symbolic power in Pierre Bourdieu’s work on Algeria, language, and critical engagement with Max Weber before surveying its uses in IPS scholarship on (in)security, diplomacy, and international law. It highlights ways to revitalize the study of symbolic power through Bourdieu’s engagement with Max Weber’s sociology of religion. Symbolic power helps generate new insights into themes of democratic politics, activism, religion, capitalism, and transformation by pointing to the entwinement of symbolic and material forms of power. I conclude that a symbolic power lens is not limited to analyzing the emergence and legitimation of social order produced through struggles between competing visions of the social world held by multiple actors but can help explore the power of symbolic revolutions, as Bourdieu demonstrated in his unfinished work on Manet and the artistic world
III. From performance to mastery: rethinking diverse writing assessments across disciplines
No full textDiversifying assessments to include forms of communication beyond the academic essay is thought to provide students with more ways of demonstrating their knowledge, leading to improved student outcomes. This essay explores the underlying assumptions of this premise, with reference to the adoption of a policy brief assignment in an environmental policy module. Far from being less demanding than an essay, assessments such as presentations, policy briefs, podcasts, etc. have nuanced purposes, requiring careful crafting. As assessment styles multiply, some students may adopt a maladaptive performance-orientated approach rather than mastering new forms of writing, such that offering more choice could paradoxically lead to negative impacts on student outcomes. We explore how educators can support students to succeed when completing diverse assessments, questioning whether the social function of popular writing is diminished in the ‘sandbox’ setting of the classroom, impacting students’ comprehension of such assignments and their motivation to engage with them
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