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Almiron, Núria; Cole, Matthew; & Freeman, Carrie P. (Eds.) (2016). Critical Animal and Media Studies. New York: Routledge. This book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media... more
Almiron, Núria; Cole, Matthew; & Freeman, Carrie P. (Eds.) (2016). Critical Animal and Media Studies. New York: Routledge.

This book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media studies and to put media studies on the agenda of animal ethics researchers. Contributors examine the convergence of media and animal ethics from theoretical, philosophical, discursive, social constructionist, and political economic perspectives. The book is divided into three sections: foundations, representation, and responsibility, outlining the different disciplinary approaches’ application to media studies and covering how non-human animals, and the relationship between humans and non-humans, are represented by the mass media, concluding with suggestions for how the media, as a major producer of cultural norms and values related to non-human animals and how we treat them, might improve such representations.
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This book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media studies and to put media studies on the agenda of animal ethics researchers. Contributors examine the convergence of media... more
This book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media studies and to put media studies on the agenda of animal ethics researchers. Contributors examine the convergence of media and animal ethics from theoretical, philosophical, discursive, social constructionist, and political economic perspectives. The book is divided into three sections: foundations, representation, and responsibility, outlining the different disciplinary approaches’ application to media studies and covering how non-human animals, and the relationship between humans and non-humans, are represented by the mass media, concluding with suggestions for how the media, as a major producer of cultural norms and values related to non-human animals and how we treat them, might improve such representations.
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Focusing on the socialization of the human use of other animals as resources in contemporary Western society, this book explores the cultural reproduction of human-nonhuman animal relations in childhood. With close attention to the... more
Focusing on the socialization of the human use of other animals as resources in contemporary Western society, this book explores the cultural reproduction of human-nonhuman animal relations in childhood. With close attention to the dominant practices through which children encounter animals and mainstream representations of animals in children's culture - whether in terms of the selective exposure of children to animals as ‘pets’ or as food in the home or in school, or the representation of animals in mass media and social media - Our Children and Other Animals reveals the interconnectedness of studies of childhood, culture and human-animal relations. In doing so it establishes the importance of human-animal relations in sociology, by describing the sociological importance of animals in children's lives and children in animals’ lives.

Presenting a new typology of the various kinds of human-animal relationship, this conceptually innovative book constitutes a clear demonstration of the relevance of sociology to the interdisciplinary field of human-animal relations and will appeal to readers across the social sciences with interests in sociology, childhood studies, cultural and media studies and human-animal interaction.

Contents: Part I Conceptualizing Western Human-Nonhuman Animal Relations: Introduction; The use of names: socially constructing animals as ‘others’; The historical separation of children from other animals; The construction and study of children and childhood. Part II The Contemporary Socialization of Human-Nonhuman Relations in Childhood: Family practices and the shaping of human-nonhuman identities; Cute style: mass media representations of other animals; Education: making anthroparchal domination reasonable; Playing with power: virtual relations with other animals in digital media. Part III Reconstructing Children’s Relations with Other Animals: Vegan Practices and Representations: We’ve got to get out of this place: the Utopian vehicularity of vegan children’s culture; Conclusion: resisting the zooicidal imperative. Bibliography; Index.
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This book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media studies and to put media studies on the agenda of animal ethics researchers. Contributors examine the convergence of media... more
This book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media studies and to put media studies on the agenda of animal ethics researchers. Contributors examine the convergence of media and animal ethics from theoretical, philosophical, discursive, social constructionist, and political economic perspectives. The book is divided into three sections: foundations, representation, and responsibility, outlining the different disciplinary approaches’ application to media studies and covering how non-human animals, and the relationship between humans and non-humans, are represented by the mass media, concluding with suggestions for how the media, as a major producer of cultural norms and values related to non-human animals and how we treat them, might improve such representations.
This paper explores tensions between challenging and reproducing the exploitation of other animals as food in the BBC television series Doctor Who, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013. A common theme of the programme is the... more
This paper explores tensions between challenging and reproducing the exploitation of other animals as food in the BBC television series Doctor Who, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013. A common theme of the programme is the Doctor saving humankind from exploitation or extermination by alien Others, in which the horror of the story inheres in the objectification of human beings through enslavement, as consumable resources, or as worthless ‘vermin’. As such, Doctor Who explores a science fiction trope of exploding hubristic human ‘superiority’ in the face of technologically and/or intellectually superior alien threats. This potentially unsettles the nonfictional human exploitation of other animals in two ways: Firstly, by encouraging empathy in the audience with the experience of oppression and suffering, and secondly by dramatizing the moral vacuity of exploitation, which tends to be legitimated by crude pseudo-Darwinian ‘might makes right’ ideology. This trope was explicitly manipulated to directly challenge ‘meat’-eating in the 1985 serial, The Two Doctors (BBC 1985), which concludes with the Doctor declaring to his human companion; ‘from now on it’s a healthy vegetarian diet for both of us’.
However, despite the continued manipulation of the empathetic, anti-hubristic trope in the new series of Doctor Who, the Doctor’s vegetarianism has vanished, instead being replaced with on-screen food practices that sit uncomfortably with the moral logic of the character’s consistent opposition to domination and exploitation on the basis of claims to ‘superiority’. The current series therefore reproduces conventional food practices for the audience, abandoning the earlier moral leadership away from ‘meat’-eating, for both audience and fictional companion. The new series is exemplary of the mainstream cultural suppression of discomfiting ethical challenges to conventional exploitative food practices. However, it retains the potential to be a platform for a character-driven exploration and implicit advocacy of vegan ethics in popular culture.
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The ethics of our treatment of other animals, particularly our treatment of non-‘wild’ animals, is an almost invisible topic in the media. Until very recently critical media studies neglected it as well. Nevertheless, the media’s role in... more
The ethics of our treatment of other animals, particularly our treatment of non-‘wild’ animals, is an almost invisible topic in the media. Until very recently critical media studies neglected it as well. Nevertheless, the media’s role in manufacturing human consent for the oppression and exploitation of nonhumans is central—just as central as it is for the oppression of humans; the latter extensively documented by critical media scholars. As Stibbe reminds us, “the coercive power used to oppress animals depends on the consent of the majority of the human population” (2012, p. 20). Capitalistic media play a key role in the manufacturing of this consent by not challenging or directly supporting the ideology that justifies treating other species as we do.
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This analysis of the media representations on either side of the attack on the Koupparis twins shows the suddenness with which urban foxes can be discursively ‘repositioned,’ and more generally reveals the precariousness of the benevolent... more
This analysis of the media representations on either side of the attack on the Koupparis twins shows the suddenness with which urban foxes can be discursively ‘repositioned,’ and more generally reveals the precariousness of the benevolent toleration of nonhuman others in human-defined urban milieu, with lethal consequences.
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“Every child should visit an abattoir. If you disagree, ask yourself why” (Monbiot, 2014) A facetious, albeit truthful, answer to this provocation might be that abattoirs should be immediately abolished, so that no child should ever be... more
“Every child should visit an abattoir. If you disagree, ask yourself why” (Monbiot, 2014)
A facetious, albeit truthful, answer to this provocation might be that abattoirs should be immediately abolished, so that no child should ever be able to visit one, other than perhaps as a virtual exhibit in a museum that memorializes the victims of human supremacism, lest we forget. But this challenge, issued in an online newspaper column by prominent environmental campaigner George Monbiot, is a significant intervention into a strand of environmentalist discourse that tends to marginalize the exploitation of other animals and in so doing elides its supremacist foundations at the very moment that it decries human domination of the Earth.
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"Advocating and practicing veganism, conceived as the repudiation of species-privilege, is arguably fundamental to Critical Animal Studies (CAS) scholarship. This ethical sine qua non for CAS represents a point of disjuncture with Animal... more
"Advocating and practicing veganism, conceived as the repudiation of species-privilege, is arguably fundamental to Critical Animal Studies (CAS) scholarship. This ethical sine qua non for CAS represents a point of disjuncture with Animal Studies. However, one of the obstacles CAS encounters is an academic and popular discourse of veganism that trivialises it as an individualised, ascetic dietary practice (see Cole, 2008; Cole and Morgan, 2011), rather than confronting its revolutionary position on human-other animal relations. Vegan’s own discourse, reflected in personal testimony or vegan activist literature (see for example: McDonald, 2000; Rosenfield, 2002; Stepaniak, 2000) typically emphasizes that veganism constitutes a philosophy, way of life, or ethical practice, within which diet is only one, albeit significant, element. This chapter offers an account of the historical formation of veganism as an ethical, rather than dietary, practice.
Foucault’s later work on ethics therefore offers a fruitful way to understand the meaning of veganism as it has been experienced and constituted by vegans themselves. This chapter then, presents a discourse analysis of archival documents from the UK Vegan Society, focussing on the early years of The Vegan magazine (which is the quarterly journal of the Society, and which began publication as The Vegan News in 1944). The reason for this historical focus is that it was at this point that hitherto dispersed ethical practices were first forged as a recognisable moral code named ‘veganism’, towards which individual ‘vegans’ could orient themselves in the context of a community of ethical practice. From its inception, The Society itself, the ethical practice of veganism, and the very word vegan, were self-consciously constructed so as to instantiate a new form of ethical relationship between human and nonhuman animals.
This process therefore bears interpretation in light of Foucault’s model of ethics, the ‘ethical fourfold’, which Rabinow interprets as ‘ethical substance, mode of subjectivation, ethical work, and telos’ (2000: xxvi). Briefly, analysis reveals that the ‘ethical substance’ of veganism connotes a re-evaluation of the relationship between humans and other animals, which includes a reconfiguring of corporeal desires, such as for food. The ‘mode of subjectivation’ is manifested in the relationship of individual vegans to The Vegan Society (as members or supporters), and to other vegans through it, as a moral community that constitutes veganism as a way of life. The ‘ethical work’, or the means by which vegans work on themselves in order to become ethical subjects, appears, for instance, in practical advice on cultivating dietary and other habits that are non-exploitative of other animals and coping with a wider society hostile to veganism. The ‘telos’, or the moral goal towards which vegans orient themselves, emerges as not only the personal, or familial, ideal of living a compassionate and non-exploitative life, but also the utopian ambition for a wholesale reordering of human-nonhuman animal relations so as to inculcate a more compassionate and peaceable society.
In summary, Foucault’s work is illuminative of the social construction of veganism as an ethical practice that always already transcended dietary regimen, and which anticipates many of the core concerns of CAS. Moreover, the formation of vegan subjects is properly understood not as a solipsistic process of moral perfection, but from its outset, as a utopian social movement gesturing towards a human society that renounces the exploitation of other animals and thereby repudiates human species-privilege.

References
Cole, M. (2008) ‘Asceticism and hedonism in research discourses of veg*anism’, British Food Journal, 110(7): 706-16
Cole, M. & Morgan, K. (2011) ‘Vegaphobia: Derogatory discourses of veganism and the reproduction of speciesism in UK national newspapers’, British Journal of Sociology, 61 (1): 134-153
Foucault, M. (1992) The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality: Volume Two, London: Penguin
McDonald, B. (2000) ‘“Once You Know Something, You Can’t Not Know It” An Empirical Look at Becoming Vegan’, Society & Animals, 8: 1-23
Rabinow, P. (2000) ‘Introduction: The History of Systems of Thought’, in M. Foucault Ethics, London: Penguin
Rosenfield, J.H. (ed.) (2002) Vegan Stories, St Leonards-on-Sea: The Vegan Society
Stepaniak, J. (2000) Being Vegan: Living with Conscience, Conviction, and Compassion, Los Angeles, USA: Lowell House
Watson, D. (1947) ‘An Appeal by the President’, The Vegan 3(4). "
If Doctor Who is supposed to respect members of other species, not all of his incarnations see eye to eye when it comes to dinner.
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This paper critically analyses the legitimation of exploitative human–nonhuman animal relations in online ‘farming’ simulation games, especially the game Hay Day. The analysis contributes to a wider project of critical analyses of popular... more
This paper critically analyses the legitimation of exploitative human–nonhuman animal relations in online ‘farming’ simulation games, especially the game Hay Day. The analysis contributes to a wider project of critical analyses of popular culture representations of nonhuman animals. The paper argues that legitimation is effected in Hay Day and cognate games through: the construction of idyllic rural utopias in gameplay, imagery, and soundscape; the depiction of anthropomorphized nonhumans who are complicit in their own subjection; the suppression of references to suffering, death, and sexual reproduction among ‘farmed’ animals; and the colonialist transmission of Western norms of nonhuman animal use and food practices among the global audience of players. Hay Day thereby resonates with the wider cultural legitimation of nonhuman animal exploitation through establishing emotional connections with idealized representations of nonhuman animals at the same time as they inhibit the development of awareness and empathy about the exploitation of real nonhuman animals.
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We live in a culture that is deeply confused about other animals. Collectively, we may profess to be ‘animal lovers’ but in practice that love is reserved for a lucky few, including those we usually call ‘pets’, or is conditionally... more
We live in a culture that is deeply confused about other animals. Collectively, we may profess to be ‘animal lovers’ but in practice that love is reserved for a lucky few, including those we usually call ‘pets’, or is conditionally reserved for animals who perform for us on racetracks, in films or on TV. ‘Pets’ and nonhuman sporting or media celebrities are by no means safe from the consequences of getting mixed up with us humans, but we deliberately kill many, many more: Globally, it is estimated that over 150 billion nonhuman animals are slaughtered for human food every year.
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Copyright 2008 by [Hines, Zokaei, Evans, Beale, Miele, Cole]. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.... more
Copyright 2008 by [Hines, Zokaei, Evans, Beale, Miele, Cole]. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. ... Identifying the Implications of ...
This essay presents a critical analysis of the claims of three biotechnological innovations to be facilitative of nonhuman animal liberation: de-domestication; in vitro meat (IVM); and human tissue research. The analysis is facilitated by... more
This essay presents a critical analysis of the claims of three biotechnological innovations to be facilitative of nonhuman animal liberation: de-domestication; in vitro meat (IVM); and human tissue research. The analysis is facilitated by the application of a conceptual model of human/nonhuman animal relations, which highlights the interconnection of hegemonic material and discursive practices in classifying the nature and purpose of nonhuman animals. The analysis therefore considers both the liberatory potential of each biotechnology, as well as its limitations, in light of its capacity to, respectively, generate novel material and discursive practices or to reproduce existing ones. The essay concludes with an extended discussion of an alternative, nonbiotechnological approach to animal liberation rooted in the ecofeminist work of Marti Kheel and Brian Luke.
From the conclusion: "Puss in Boots exemplifies the cultural reproduction of speciesist norms that legitimate the exploitation of nonhuman others, intersected with heteronormative, sexist and classist stereotypes. Challenging the... more
From the conclusion: "Puss in Boots exemplifies the cultural reproduction of speciesist norms that legitimate the exploitation of nonhuman others, intersected with heteronormative, sexist and classist stereotypes. Challenging the socialisation of children into those norms through ‘innocent’ vehicles like Puss in Boots therefore remains an urgent task for critical animal studies."
While the case for veganism may be argued to be beyond debate, ending the exploitation of nonhuman animals remains hindered by the ubiquity of speciesism. This paper therefore explores the resilience of the speciesist order in two related... more
While the case for veganism may be argued to be beyond debate, ending the exploitation of nonhuman animals remains hindered by the ubiquity of speciesism. This paper therefore explores the resilience of the speciesist order in two related contexts: the cultural reproduction of speciesism, including the ridicule of veganism; the applicability of Cohen’s sociological theory of denial to the exploitation of nonhuman animals. In so doing, the paper points towards intersections between speciesism and other forms of oppression, which may in turn help to inform effective vegan activism and prevent veganism from being marginalized as a “single issue."
This paper critically examines discourses of veganism in UK national newspapers in 2007. In setting parameters for what can and cannot easily be discussed, dominant discourses also help frame understanding. Discourses relating to veganism... more
This paper critically examines discourses of veganism in UK national newspapers in 2007. In setting parameters for what can and cannot easily be discussed, dominant discourses also help frame understanding. Discourses relating to veganism are therefore presented as contravening commonsense, because they fall outside readily understood meat-eating discourses. Newspapers tend to discredit veganism through ridicule, or as being difficult or impossible to maintain in practice. Vegans are variously stereotyped as ascetics, faddists, sentimentalists, or in some cases, hostile extremists. The overall effect is of a derogatory portrayal of vegans and veganism that we interpret as ‘vegaphobia’. We interpret derogatory discourses of veganism in UK national newspapers as evidence of the cultural reproduction of speciesism, through which veganism is dissociated from its connection with debates concerning nonhuman animals' rights or liberation. This is problematic in three, interrelated, respects. First, it empirically misrepresents the experience of veganism, and thereby marginalizes vegans. Second, it perpetuates a moral injury to omnivorous readers who are not presented with the opportunity to understand veganism and the challenge to speciesism that it contains. Third, and most seriously, it obscures and thereby reproduces exploitative and violent relations between human and nonhuman animals.
Michel Foucault’s work traces shifting techniques in the governance of humans, from the production of ‘docile bodies’ subjected to the knowledge formations of the human sciences (disciplinary power), to the facilitation of self-governing... more
Michel Foucault’s work traces shifting techniques in the governance of humans, from the production of ‘docile bodies’ subjected to the knowledge formations of the human sciences (disciplinary power), to the facilitation of self-governing agents directed towards specified forms of self-knowledge by quasi-therapeutic authorities (pastoral power). While mindful of the important differences between the governance of human subjects and the oppression of nonhuman animals, exemplified in nonhuman animals’ legal status as property, this paper explores parallel shifts from disciplinary to pastoral regimes of human-‘farmed’ animal relations. Recent innovations in ‘animal-centred’ welfare science represent a trend away from the ‘disciplinary’ techniques of confinement and torture associated with ‘factory farms’ and towards quasi-therapeutic ways of claiming to know ‘farmed’ animals, in which the animals themselves are co-opted into the processes by which knowledge about them is generated. The new pastoral turn in ‘animal-centred’ welfare finds popular expression in ‘happy meat’ discourses that invite ‘consumers’ to adopt a position of vicarious carer for the ‘farmed’ animals who they eat. The paper concludes that while ‘animal-centred’ welfare reform and ‘happy meat’ discourses promise a possibility of a somewhat less degraded life for some ‘farmed’ animals, they do so by perpetuating exploitation and oppression and entrenching speciesist privilege by making it less vulnerable to critical scrutiny.
Advocates of veganism frequently present their case holistically, outlining its benefits for nonhuman and human animals and for our shared environment. However, a consistent feature of ‘mainstream’ public discourse on veganism is the... more
Advocates of veganism frequently present their case holistically, outlining its benefits for nonhuman and human animals and for our shared environment. However, a consistent feature of
‘mainstream’ public discourse on veganism is the tendency to fracture that holistic case. In particular, the case for nonhuman animal liberation tends to be set aside, so as to clear the path
for a reassertion of anthropocentric values that, despite otherwise radical appearances, work to re-entrench speciesist privilege. In this paper, I present a detailed case study of one high-profile example of this process. In October 2008, the prestigious UK periodical, The Ecologist, published
an issue that focused on the issue of ‘meat’-eating. The contributing authors to the issue stressed the anthropocentric benefits of a particular form of ‘meat’-eating, while simultaneously failing to confront the holistic case for veganism.
Nonhuman animals are primarily defined according to their form of relation with human beings, which broadly depends on the perceived utility of those animals to humans. These relations may be analyzed to generate typologies, membership of... more
Nonhuman animals are primarily defined according to their form of relation with human beings, which broadly depends on the perceived utility of those animals to humans. These relations may be analyzed to generate typologies, membership of which circumscribes the probable fate of nonhuman animals when they enter into contact with humans. However, these judgments of utility and category membership are contingent and socially constructed, as demonstrated by cultural and historical variability in the species and individual animals assigned to particular types. This paper explores how the combination of childhood literary and film traditions relating to animals and associated promotional food tie-ins aimed at children contribute to a food socialization process whereby children learn to conceptually distance the animals they eat from those with whom they have an emotional bond or for whom they feel ethically responsible. In so doing, we develop a theoretical scheme for the differentiated positioning of animals.
Animal farming exceeds all forms of transport in terms of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Despite the implications of the seriousness of addressing animal farming in relation to mitigating the effects of GHG emissions, to date, the... more
Animal farming exceeds all forms of transport in terms of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Despite the implications of the seriousness of addressing animal farming in relation to mitigating the effects of GHG emissions, to date, the relationship between consumer behaviour and climate change has tended to neglect the role of animal foods. This paper reports on a pilot study in which six UK households were ‘shadowed’ to facilitate the investigation of the relationship between animal food practices and environmental practices, as they emerge in day-to-day life. Results indicate that most participants make no connection between the two issues at present, in terms of awareness or practice. However, animal foods do have an ambiguous and complex status in most participants' food practices; for instance, being viewed as problematic for reasons of health or animal welfare. This finding suggests that further research is needed into the potential for raising awareness of the link between animal-based foods and climate change. This might have a role to play in shifting food practices towards more plant-based, less GHG intensive, foods.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the dominance of an ascetic discourse of veg*anism in social research literature, and to relate it to a dominant hierarchical ordering of Western diets (to refer collectively to... more
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the dominance of an ascetic discourse of veg*anism in social research literature, and to relate it to a dominant hierarchical ordering of Western diets (to refer collectively to veganism and vegetarianism).

Design/methodology/approach – A review of the extant social research literature on veg*anism was undertaken in order to discern whether a consistent type of descriptive language existed. This facilitated an understanding of the way in which that language is constitutive of research generated understandings of veg*anism.

Findings – An ascetic discourse of veg*anism is dominant in social research. This is reflected in the phraseology used by authors. Typical descriptive terms of a veg*an diet include “strict”, “restrictive”, or “avoidance”. This ascetic discourse reproduces the hierarchical ordering of Western diets such that veg*anism is denigrated and made to seem “difficult” and abnormal.

Research limitations/implications – Veg*anism arguably promises multiple benefits for human, environmental, and nonhuman animal well-being. The potential to realize those benefits is hampered by the perpetuation of an understanding of veg*anism as an ascetic practice.

Originality/value – This paper provides the first comprehensive examination of the language used to describe veg*anism within social research. It can enhance reflexivity on the part of social researchers interested in veg*anism, and help inform research design. In providing an alternative hedonic discourse of veg*anism, this paper also makes a contribution towards realizing the potential benefits of veg*anism through making it a more attractive dietary practice.
The 1980s witnessed an intense political and ideological struggle over unemployment in Britain, which often involved sociologists defending the unemployed against real or perceived governmental attacks on their work ethic. Notwithstanding... more
The 1980s witnessed an intense political and ideological struggle over unemployment in Britain, which often involved sociologists defending the unemployed against real or perceived governmental attacks on their work ethic. Notwithstanding valid criticisms of the practical efficacy of supply-side unemployment policies, this rebuttal of governmental`victim-blaming'tactics restricted a deeper critique of the meaning and purpose of work, and perversely helped to reproduce a moral discourse of work in symbiosis with the Thatcher government. Subsequent critiques of New Labour policies have frequently perpetuated this moral discourse, through explicitly or tacitly positing (paid) `work' as the preferred or only `solution' to the `problem' of unemployment.An alternative solution could be a guaranteed income policy. This could both challenge the moral discourse of work and direct policy critique away from areas that teleologically inscribe preferred lifestyles such as that of paid worker.
The importance of employment exchanges in the governance of mass unemployment in the 1930s presented social researchers with a rich site for the investigation of the meaning of unemployment from a governmental perspective, or more... more
The importance of employment exchanges in the governance of mass unemployment in the 1930s presented social researchers with a rich site for the investigation of the meaning of unemployment from a governmental perspective, or more precisely, of how that meaning is encoded into social spaces. Comparing writing from the 1930s and earlier with my own contemporary research in Jobcentres, Benefits Agencies and Jobcentre Plus offices facilitates an understanding of how that meaning, and its literally concrete means of deployment, has shifted. Observation conducted in these institutional spaces adds an empirical dimension to extant discursive analyses of the governance of unemployment. Broadly, there has been a move from an overt, gendered stigmatization of being without paid work as a moral failing deserving of penance in the 1930s employment exchange, to an attempt to discursively rearticulate unemployment with a mainstream nexus of work-consumerism in Jobcentre Plus. These changes are also indicative of broader societal shifts in the values ascribed to work and consumerism, and the ways in which a governmentally consecrated subjectivity can be achieved.
The research of Jahoda et al. in the Austrian town of Marienthal in the 1930s had a formative influence over the future of unemployment research in the social sciences. This article contends that that research was predicated on a tacit... more
The research of Jahoda et al. in the Austrian town of Marienthal in the 1930s had a formative influence over the future of unemployment research in the social sciences. This article contends that that research was predicated on a tacit set of beliefs about a gendered relationship between `human nature' and `work'. One consequence of this was that a moral discourse of human nature as fundamentally a working or labouring nature firmly anchored the trajectory of subsequent research into unemployment. This article presents a detailed critique of the moral discourse of human nature that underpins the Marienthal study and its theoretical elaboration into staged theories of psychological response to unemployment, and in so doing argues the necessity for freeing the sociological imagination from the types of belief reproduced by Jahoda et al. as to what human beings, and therefore human societies, are for.
Although the burgeoning study of ‘animals and society’ has demonstrated that Nonhuman Animals1 are heavily embedded in human societies, institutions, and systems, the sociological discipline has been overwhelmingly silent on these... more
Although the burgeoning study of ‘animals and society’ has demonstrated that Nonhuman Animals1 are heavily embedded in human societies, institutions, and systems, the sociological discipline has been overwhelmingly silent on these relationships (Nibert, 2003; Peggs, 2013; Wrenn, 2016). When other animals are mentioned, it is primarily as food stuffs, environmental contagions, or tributary characters in human development. They remain absent referents in this sense – objects but never subjects (Adams, 2015). The same can be said of critical media studies despite its fundamental interest in exposing hidden economies of media dissemination, interpretation, and influence. Human animals
may be the only species responsible for media construction, but they are certainly not the only to be depicted or impacted. Media has real-world consequences for Nonhuman Animals who are represented (or invisibilized) on screen or page, and, invariably, these consequences impact humans as well. For the literature to remain silent on these connections is a disservice to the discipline of scientific inquiry and critical thought.
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