Search

This paper unpacks the contested inter-connections between neoliberal work and welfare regimes, asylum and immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. The concept of precarity is explored as a way of understanding intensifying and insecure post-Fordist work in late capitalism. Migrants are centrally implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets in Global North countries, including becoming trapped in forced labour. Building on existing research on the working experiences of migrants in the Global North, the main part of the article considers three questions. First, what is precarity and how does the concept relate to working lives? Second, how might we understand the causes of extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious lifeworlds? Third, how can we adequately theorize these particular experiences using the conceptual tools of forced labour, slavery, unfreedom and precarity? We use the concept of ‘hyper-precarity’ alongside notions of a ‘continuum of unfreedom’ as a way of furthering human geographical inquiry into the intersections between various terrains of social action and conceptual debate concerning migrants’ precarious working experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The May 2010 election of a Conservative-dominated UK coalition government unleashed an unprecedented austerity drive under the auspices of ‘deficit reduction’ in the wake of the global financial crisis. This article focuses on housing policy to show how the ‘cuts’ are being used as an ideological cover for a far-reaching, market-driven restructuring of social welfare policy that amounts to a return of what Ralph Miliband called ‘class war conservatism’. We revisit the main ideological contours and materialist drivers of Thatcherism as a hegemonic strategy, discussing the central role played by housing privatization in the neoliberal project that was continued, but not completed, by New Labour. We then discuss the Coalition’s assault on the housing welfare safety net it inherited, arguing this has rapidly shut down alternative directions for housing and represents a strategic intervention designed to unblock and expand the market, complete the residualization of social housing and draw people into an ever more economically precarious housing experience in order to boost capitalist interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper introduces the themed section of Critical Social Policy on social housing, privatization and neoliberalism. In tracing the key elements in the development of privatization and residualization since 1979, it argues that these can only be fully understood as part of a wider neoliberalizing agenda, an agenda that is driven by a particular class project. The paper also seeks to re-assert the importance of a critical approach to successive decades of social housing policies in the devolved UK, arguing that the classed basis of housing privatization policies has been largely overlooked by academics in favour of an evolutionary and ‘modernizing’ framework which isolates developments in social housing provision from other wider shifts in social welfare and in labour markets. Understanding such processes, it is claimed, is a necessary step in the development of a more socially just and sustainable form of housing provision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ongoing crisis of global capitalism has served only to intensify the past four decades of neoliberal restructuring of cities across the world. In this paper I critically reflect on a literary aspect of the neoliberalising city academic discourse that is too often left untheorised or underplayed—the prevalence of contemporary urban enclosure. My aim is twofold: to synthesise theories of old and new enclosure with more familiar understandings of neoliberal urban processes; and to then apply this framework to the British housing experience of the past four decades. In doing so, I argue that enclosure is not only a metaphor for contemporary urban policy and processes but also provides an explanation for what is taking place. The paper concludes with some brief thoughts on how today's ‘urban commoners’ might contest the new urban enclosures by finding common cause around visions and practices of a ‘new urban commons’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper responds to recent debates in human geography about ideal-type versus contingent neoliberalism, or what Gibson-Graham conceptualises as 'strong' vs 'weak' theory, by offering some reflections from an in-depth study of the private finance initiative (PFI) in England. It first introduces the history and purpose of the PFI as the Labour government's flagship public-private partnership (PPP) approach to public infrastructure modernisation. It then critically analyses its use in inner-city regeneration through a case study of a PFI housing scheme in the northern English city of Leeds. The paper argues that, when seen through the lens of 'strong theory', a PFI appears to be a consciously designed 'neoliberal straitjacket' intended to lock-in gentrification-based regeneration at the neighbourhood level, guarantee long-term profits to (finance) capital, and create powerful privatising and marketising pressures across the local public sphere. However, it is equally possible to construct a preliminary 'weak theory' of the PFI that unhides its inherent contradictions and shows how everyday activism by local community actors can successfully influence and contest how neoliberalism is rolled out on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an honest, reflexive account of action research with activists. Through a two year project called 'Autonomous Geographies', a team of researchers undertook case studies with three groups: self-managed social centres, tenants resisting housing privatisation, and eco-pioneers setting up a Low Impact Development. The original aim was to explore the everyday lives of activists as they attempted to resist life under capitalism and build more autonomous ways of living. The paper reflects on the messy, difficult and personally challenging research process of the project, with the failures being more instructive than the successes. By recounting this experience we provide lessons for the complex but necessary process of doing what is known as scholar activism in what we see as difficult, neo-liberal times. In particular we focus on how we can better formulate and implement strategic interventions with activists and social movements. We need to reject the false distinction between academia and wider society in conceptualisations of valid sites of struggle and knowledge production, and to find ways to research and engage collectively and politically, rather than individually. To this end, the paper offers seven principles for scholar activism that can be applied inside and outside the neo-liberal university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]