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- Convenors:
-
Celia Plender
(University of Exeter)
Jessica Fagin (University of Sheffield)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
Short Abstract:
This panel interrogates the trajectories of crises in Britain in relation to social unrest, polarisation and inequality. We aim to expand notions of perma/polycrisis, exploring how crises are understood and experienced over time and the different social and political processes that feed into them.
Long Abstract:
In July 2024, race riots erupted in Britain, as Far Right groups and those with anti-immigrant attitudes co-opted the mass-murder of young girls to enact violence against asylum seekers, migrants, and Britain’s ethnic minorities. On the one hand, the riots could be interpreted as part of a new age of poly/permacrisis in which we lurch from one crisis to the next. These are exemplified by events such as Brexit, the pandemic, wars in Palestine and Ukraine and their impacts, creating a constant sense of uncertainty, volatility, diminishing resources and competition for the resources that are left. On the other hand, there was firstly a circularity to how classed and racialised groups were blamed and legitimised for the unrest. Secondly, there was a linearity between the cost of living crisis thought to have caused the rioters disenfranchisement and longer trajectories of austerity and the neoliberalisation of welfare, which started with Thatcher in a time of economic instability and existential threat. So, how new are such dynamics of crisis?
We invite papers which ethnographically engage with crises in Britain and responses to them from different perspectives, drawing out continuities and discontinuities over time. We ask, does the rhetoric of crisis everywhere all at once dull attention to contextual specificities? Or does it sharpen our understanding of the entwinement of crises and their direction of travel? How are crises experienced and understood? What have their catalysts been in Britain? And how have they formed part of bigger social and political dynamics?
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
This paper ethnographically examines the everyday justifications and tensions of contemporary British public protection policing. Officials’ claims to care repurpose historic conceptions of policing from a welfarist golden age, combined with a humanitarian ethos in response to contemporary crises.
Paper long abstract:
This paper ethnographically examines the everyday pursuits of public protection policing officials to address the dual crises of austerity and police legitimacy. Successive Westminster governments over the past decade have promised to take ‘vulnerability’ seriously, pledging to relieve forms of re-discovered human misery. Similarly, British police forces, beset by legitimation crises, have asserted that the ‘protection of vulnerable people from harm’ is among their highest priorities, establishing public protection teams to signal this commitment. These crises serve as conscious resources for officials to articulate a will to care that blends post-war welfarist aspirations with contemporary humanitarian ideals. Positioning themselves as a last resort amid welfare retrenchment, public protection officials leverage public discontent with under-resourced services, asserting the comparative advantage of their own uniquely relational and compassionate style of working. They aspire to embody the nostalgic figure of the ‘noble bobby,’ assert their personal responsibility to alleviate suffering, idealise welfarist visions of reciprocal honesty and respectability, and embrace post-war psychodynamic models that attribute criminality to disrupted familial bonds and trauma. Pedagogical interventions feature prominently in officials’ evaluations of the success of their work—such as transformed relationships, reduced substance use, and increased school attendance—rather than simply securing convictions. At the heart of their labour is a preoccupation to demonstrate ‘care’, with the promise of rebuilding police legitimacy. Their will to care features a recursive logic that takes state failure as its condition of possibility and deploys officials’ emotional-moral labour at the coalface of multiple crises facing the British public sector.
Paper short abstract:
Responding to calls for historicity within current anthropological work on crisis, this paper focuses on experiences of political economic change within Britain in two recent eras of conservative rule: Thatcherism and austerity, from the perspective of members of a grassroots food co-op
Paper long abstract:
Responding to calls for historicity within current anthropological work on crisis (see for e.g. Henig & Knight 2023), this paper focuses on experiences of political economic change within Britain in two recent eras of conservative rule: Thatcherism and austerity. It builds on almost two years of fieldwork with a grassroots food cooperative in London, which took place from 2015-17 at a time when post-financial crisis austerity was significantly impacting on many people’s lives in Britain. The food co-op itself started in the late 1980s at a time of growing interest in anarchism and non-hierarchical organising, in response to Thatcherism and the crisis of the political left after the Cold War. The paper draws on interviews conducted with past and present members of the food co-op to explore the national, political-economic environment in which multiple crises were playing out in these two eras, how these were experienced on the ground, and the forms of affective charge they held for those involved within the food co-ops, as well as the forms of action (and inaction) that they fostered. Building on approaches to crisis that move away from notions of rupture, towards chronicity and endemic imbalance, it is attentive to the kinds of ‘action and meaning’ (Vigh 2008: 5) that these different phases of neoliberal policy making and politics within Britain have fostered.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers “polycrisis” amongst UK Freedom Movement activists, in relation to an (allegedly) unfolding Great Reset. I argue for close engagement between specific crisis rhetorics and their respective contexts, and suggest parallels between “crisis thinking” and “conspiracy thinking”.
Paper long abstract:
Reflecting on fieldwork conducted around the UK and via the social media platform Telegram, this paper explores how UK Freedom Movement members conceive of their activism in opposition to an (allegedly) unfolding “Great Reset”. A ‘conspiracy attuned’ social movement (Davis 2024), the Freedom Movement first emerged in opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns and mass vaccination programmes. However, it has since embedded itself as a network of campaign groups, political parties and “off-grid” communities. Understood to be a secretive plot to abolish national democracies and establish a technocratic world government, I demonstrate how the “Great Reset” operates as a unifying conceptual framework for the Movement, in making sense of, and opposing, a wide range of policy measures. Framed thus, traffic zoning measures such as Low Emission Zones or “15-Minute City” schemes, “Central Bank Digital Currency” proposals (CBDCs) and “chemtrail” sightings are each encountered by activists as part of an ongoing Great Reset polycrisis (Henig and Knight 2023).
From this ethnographic backdrop, the paper advances two key points of discussion. Firstly, I suggest that engaging the contextual specificities of crisis-talk might be effectively prompted by asking the question: “for whom is this a crisis, and for whom is it not?” Secondly, following Janet Roitman’s understanding of crisis as a ‘narrative device’ which ‘eradicates contingency’ (2013, 85), I (provocatively) argue that rhetorics of crisis share certain characteristics with epistemologies of “conspiracy thinking”.
Paper short abstract:
While the language of crisis may close down some avenues of analysis or action, it can also provide a way to introduce anthropological insights into public debate. An ethnography of debt problems in Britain and its finding of 'expropriability' as a contemporary mode of power are a case in point.
Paper long abstract:
This paper takes public discourse on crisis as both a point of departure for anthropological research and an entry-way into public engagement – respectively, the global financial crisis of 2008/9 and the UK’s cost of living crisis since 2021. With surging household debt in the 2010s, I undertook an ethnography of debt problems on a housing estate in England over seven years. The research found a modality of power that, while historically contingent, was both longer-standing and wider-ranging than public discourse on the financial crisis would imply. For housing estate residents in Britain, the use of bailiffs to enforce debts sits alongside rising evictions and a punitive shift in child protection social work to form a generalised exposure to legally mediated expropriations (of possessions, homes and children). I conceptualise it as ‘expropriability’. Doing so re-frames the widespread practice by over-indebted people of ignoring their debts: from wishful thinking (as commonly claimed) to a struggle against potential expropriation that often succeeds. The recent cost of living crisis has revived journalists and politicians’ attention to the financial difficulties of low-income households, providing a potential entry for discussions of expropriability. While some anthropologists have found that a pervasive language of crisis closes down certain avenues of analysis and action (Roitman 2013), it can also provide a hook for a publicly engaged anthropology to challenge assumptions in the dominant discourse and to introduce new insights and considerations into public debate, although this activity is not without its own contradictions and dilemmas (Hale 2006).
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, I focus on the ways in which a moral panic about halal slaughter, and purported "crisis of multiculturalism" in Britain shape white British slaughter workers' racialised perceptions of the violence of their labour.
Paper long abstract:
Halal slaughter is a practice which is repeatedly invoked in British right wing media and political discourses to rhetorically construct Muslims as essential Others with incompatible, backwards, violent tendencies. Conspiratorial narratives about the Islamification of Britain are centred on the fear that the nation, its laws, schools and supermarkets, are being infiltrated by incommensurable Islamic practices (Pertwee, 2017). Such perceptions are recited to construct "moral panics", and claim that multiculturalism is in crisis, if not doomed to failure, or already dead (Lentin & Titley, 2011).
This presentation is based on ethnographic research with white British slaughtermen - who are not Muslim - employed in halal slaughterhouses. Drawing on Asad’s (2003; 2006) conceptualisation of the “religious” and the “secular,” I explore how slaughtermen navigate the violent associations of their labour through notions of morality and the “rule of law.” I argue that slaughtermen have a fluid and negotiated approach to naming violence and subtly resist drawing hard moral differences between non-stun halal and “conventional” slaughter. Yet, anti-Muslim discourses feed into their negotiations of the moral issue of violence implicit in their labour. I demonstrate how the "imagined figure" of the threatening Muslim Other (Goldberg, 2009; Razack, 2022) permeates their constructions of Muslim consumers, accreditation agencies and slaughter practices, emerging as racisms which fracture workplaces which could otherwise hold the potential for solidarities across difference.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on an ethnography of birth cohort research, the paper examines realities, tensions, and silences around class and race found in the lifeworld of longitudinal research participation in the UK during times of inequalities, crises, and violence.
Paper long abstract:
This paper thinks through participation in longitudinal biosocial research (the ALSPAC birth cohort) amid the current cost of living crisis and this past summer’s waves of racialised violence. As well as an examination of the historical context which led to the cohort's existence, the contemporary lifeworld of the cohort study provides a unique location to consider these from in that the study population, recruited from 1991-1992, both no longer reflects the demographics of Bristol and has seen disproportionate attrition over time along axes of marginalisation. Doing research with people varyingly affected by crises in a city of demographic shifts, middle-class gentrification, and classed and racialised spatial politics, is complexified by cultural and bureaucratic quiet when it comes to socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity. The ghosts and geopolitics of medical research which is regional, intergenerational, and biosocial are hidden in plain sight. In this paper, which informs a larger manuscript, I consider these historically and as I draw on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Bristol studying the cohort and its catchment area. Reflecting on a series of photovoice focus groups with intergenerational ALSPAC participants in summer 2024 provides one entry point to analysing these realities, tensions, and silences.
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on ethnographic research with Leavers and the Reform Party to explore the reproduction of racism and nationalism in the UK.
Paper long abstract:
This paper sets out to contribute to the growing body of anthropological literature that reflects on the maintenance and control of racism, nationalism, and social polarisation within British society in the face of Brexit and its aftermath. To do this I pose the following question: to what extent does the recent electoral success of the far right populist party Reform UK represent a social and political crisis within British society, that signifies increasing public support for racist and nationalist politics? In the 2024 election, Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party, secured five members of parliament and was the third largest party by popular vote, capturing 14.3% of the popular vote. Reform is led by Nigel Farage a key political instigator and force behind Brexit and former leader of the far right populist and Eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP). In this paper, I juxtapose: a) the social and political worldviews of white Leavers across class identities, who expressed support for the forerunners of Reform namely the Brexit Party and/or UKIP, with b) my ethnographic observations noted at Reform’s public conferences, meetings and rallies held during the 2024 election campaign period. I draw out some of the ways in which the racist anti-immigrant and nationalist politics of Reform has meaning and resonance with this particular group of white Leavers across working- and middle-class identities. I also examine the social, political, and ethical limits of this Party’s popular appeal with these Leave supporters.