1,721,069 research outputs found
Introduction: Situating the present
No full textWhen we started a conversation about putting together an edited collection on Theories of Race and Ethnicity, we had in mind the need for a more up-to-date overview of the field of race and ethnic studies than the one provided in John Rex and David Mason's (1986) Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations. That volume had come out in the mid 1980s, after a period of passionate, and often conflictual, debate about the changing boundaries of the study of race and ethnicity. Rex's opening statement to his chapter provided a sense of the contestation. He wrote, "The study of race relations, in common with other politically charged areas in the social sciences, seem beset with feuds and conflicts of a quite theological intensity" (Rex 1986:64). The book set out to provide an overview of key theoretical lines of analysis in the field and to engage with some new and emergent perspectives. It contained 14 chapters covering the disciplines of sociology, social anthropology and social psychology as well as sociobiology. There were macro-level approaches to race and ethnicity drawing on class analysis, the study of plural societies and Weberian and Marxist perspectives, alongside micro-level approaches such as rational choice theory and symbolic interactionism. In other words, it combined and crossed over from traditional sociological perspectives to views from related social science disciplines; it ranged across biology and sociology, and it considered ethnicity and race in a variety of settings
After Stephen Lawrence
No full textThis article, which was written in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the report of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, argues that the critical challenge will be to construct an agenda for pushing forward the key recommendations. The authors begin by briefly highlighting the uneven nature of the report's analysis and recommendations. The following sections detail the immediate reactions of the right wing press and the police. The article concludes with proposals for how to overcome the limitations of official discourses on police reform in the UK
The postmodern condition of the police
No full textGlobalisation of economies and cultures, the advent of new information and telecommunication technologies, unfolding Europeanisation, internal multi-nationalisation, and the ‘new individualism’ means that the institutional configuration of the United Kingdom is in the process of rapid transformation. Amongst criminologists, there is a heightened sense that alongside radically different forms of risk, uncertainty and instability, and the way they are perceived, an incisive re-ordering of the techniques and logics of social control is taking place. As a result, at various moments during the last decade, there has been a recognition of the urgent need to rethink the assumptions and registers on which police studies, as a sub-field of criminological knowledge, has been premised. For certain academic commentators, the surest way to get to grips with these fin de siècle transformations is through utilisation of the general theory of ‘late modernity’. More recently, discussion has moved on to crossexamining the relationship between policing and the risk society. Whilst we acknowledge the important contribution of these lines of reasoning to the theoretical revitalisation of police studies, the central aim of this article is to argue that an important debate about the value of postmodern analysis has been closed down too quickly. The first parts of this article discuss both the attempts to conjoin the postmodern with policing and the trenchant anti-postmodernist response. After providing readers with our own critical assessment of these different perspectives, the final sections of the article elaborate on the ways we think that certain of the ideas most closely associated with postmodern cultural analysis provide an understanding of contemporary transformations in British policing
Resistance through representation: ‘storylines’, advertising and Police Federation campaigns
No full textThe Police Federation has become an active and successful pressure group on policing and criminal justice issues in the U.K. This article traces the origins of the Federation through to two bitter and far reaching campaigns in the post?war period. The first was the Federation's law and order and pay campaign in the 1970s, the second its battle against the Conservative government's reform proposals during 1993. It is argued that these campaigns represented ‘moments of truth’ when the Federation took it case to the public, appealing above the heads of government and senior officers in pursuit of its goals. A notable, and perhaps unique feature of these campaigns is shifting the ‘arena of negotiation’ through the use of press advertisements. The core textual and pictorial images and representations of the police and policework deployed during these campaigns are examined through use of the richly suggestive concept of ‘storylines
Introduction: racialization in theory and practice
No full textRacialization has become one of the central concepts in the study of race and racism. It is widely used in both theoretical and empirical studies of racial situations. There has been a proliferation of texts that use this notion in quite diverse ways. It is used broadly to refer to ways of thinking about race as well as to institutional processes that give expression to forms of ethno-racial categorization. An important issue in the work of writers such as Robert Miles, for example, concerns the ways in which the construction of race is shaped historically and how the usage of that idea forms a basis for exclusionary practices. The concept therefore refers both to cultural or political processes or situations where race is invoked as an explanation, as well as to specific ideological practices in which race is deployed. It is evident, however, that despite the increasing popularity of the concept of racialization there has been relatively little critical analysis exploring its theoretical and empirical usages. It is with this underlying concern in mind that Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice brings together leading international scholars in the field of race and ethnicity in order to explore both the utility of the concept and its limitations
Introduction: race critical public scholarship
No full textIn a climate marked by expanding scholarship in ethnic and racial studies alongside sweeping changes in universities and the conditions of academic work, we seek to explore the nature of and challenges for critically engaged research, teaching and scholarship on race and racism. In particular, we look at the connection between academic scholarship and political engagement and activity that we are calling race critical public scholarship. We situate the discussion within various recent debates about universities and ‘publics’, and the public orientation and reach of academic work. We set out three frames for these issues: the impact of social movements in establishing race and racism as legitimate topics of academic investigation and setting the agenda for race research; the differing role of academics as public intellectuals and scholar-activists in addressing and engaging with publics and race issues; and the scope and limits of public sociology in addressing the responsibilities and institutionalized power of the academy. We argue that each of these frames offers a partial insight, but that further work is needed based on cases and examples that explore the facility for and challenges of undertaking race critical scholarship
Loose connections and new directions: neo-liberalism, new managerialism and the modernisation of the British police
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