This unique study explores how local bureaucrats and politicians negotiate diversity, discrimination, migration, and class in the midst of many other issues that affect community cohesion. Drawing on original empirical research, Hannah Jones contends that local government workers must often occupy uncomfortable positions when managing ethical, professional, and political commitments. Ultimately, she reveals the surprising extent to which governmental power affects the lives and emotions of the people who wield it.

This book explores the contributions that research, with refugees and with faith-based organizations for example, makes to strengthen community development and consequently promote active citizenship and social justice.

Issues of displacement and dispossession have become defining characteristics of a globalised 21st century. People are moving within and across national borders, whether displaced, relocated or moving in search of better livelihoods. This book brings theoretical understandings of migration and displacement together with empirical illustrations of the creative, cultural ways in which communities reflect upon their experiences of change, and how they respond, including through poetry and story-telling, photography and other art forms, exploring the scope for building communities of solidarity and social justice. The concluding chapters identify potential implications for policy and professional practice to promote communities of solidarity, addressing the structural causes of widening inequalities, taking account of different interests, including those related to social class, gender, ethnicity, age, ability and faith.

This book describes how young Black men on a disadvantaged housing estate in London navigate the estate’s expectations for their behaviour as they operate within a street code that endorses violence, knife-carrying and challenging masculinity. This street code informs the men’s masculine identities by promoting values of misogyny, violence and the possession of expensive material objects while subduing any performance or features deemed as weak or feminine. Chapters detail the daily pressure on young men to gain respect and perform the estate’s street code while also providing examples of young men who have escaped or rejected its influence. King also outlines how youth workers can support those trapped by the estate’s street code by embodying personalised or caring masculinity features that seek to transform the dominant masculinity.

The search for ‘the Decent Society’ – a fit place in which to live – has informed policy at both governmental and international level. This book analyses its nature and devises a consistent way of measuring the concept world-wide on the basis of a coherent theory of agency within social structure. Influenced by classical sociology and by the economist Amartya Sen, the book posits that societies need to create (a) economic security, (b) social cohesion, (c) social inclusion, and (d) the conditions for empowerment. The model is interactive and recursive; each component provides the requirements for each of the others. This book outlines the sociopolitical framework underlying ’the Decent Society' and summarises a decade of research, some of which has had a formative impact on governments’ policies. The first half contains studies of social quality based on surveys in the former Soviet Union and sub-Saharan Africa, while the second half describes the construction of a Decent Society Index for comparing very different countries across the world. This book and the index it develops will be of interest both to academics and researchers in sociology, politics, economics, psychology, social policy and development studies and to policy-makers in government, local government and the NGOs.

Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, Wessendorf explores life in a super-diverse urban neighbourhood. The book presents a vivid account of the daily doings and social relations among the residents and how they pragmatically negotiate difference in their everyday lives.

Over the past decade, the UK has experienced major policy and policy making change. This text examines this shifting political and policy landscape while also highlighting the features of UK politics that have endured. Written by Paul Cairney and Sean Kippin, leading voices in UK public policy and politics, the book combines a focus on policy making theories and concepts with the exploration of key themes and events in UK politics, including: - developing social policy in a post-pandemic world; - governing post-Brexit; and - the centrality of environmental policy. The book equips students with a robust and up-to-date understanding of UK public policy and enables them to locate this within a broader theoretical framework.

Going beyond race-blind approaches to spatial segregation in Europe, Racial Cities argues that race is the logic through which stigmatized and segregated "Gypsy urban areas" have emerged and persisted after World War II. Building on nearly a decade of ethnographic and historical research in Romania, Italy, France and the UK, Giovanni Picker casts a series of case studies into the historical framework of circulations and borrowings between colony and metropole since the late nineteenth century. By focusing on socio-economic transformations and social dynamics in contemporary Cluj-Napoca, Pescara, Montreuil, Florence and Salford, Picker detects four local segregating mechanisms, and comparatively investigates resemblances between each of them and segregation in French Rabat, Italian Addis Ababa, and British New Delhi. These multiple global associations across space and time serve as an empirical basis for establishing a solid bridge between race critical theories and urban studies. Racial Cities is the first comprehensive analysis of the segregation of Romani people in Europe, providing a fine-tuned and in-depth explanation of this phenomenon. While inequalities increase globally and poverty is ever more concentrated, this book is a key contribution to debates and actions addressing social marginality, inequalities, racist exclusions, and governance. Thanks to its dense yet thoroughly accessible narration, the book will appeal to scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and equally to activists and policy makers, who are interested in areas including: Race and Racism, Urban Studies, Governance, Inequalities, Colonialism and Postcolonialism, and European Studies.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence As Muslim women continue to be a focus of media-led debate, Naaz Rashid uses original scholarship and empirical research to examine how Muslim women are represented in policy discourse and how the trope of the Muslim woman is situated within national debates about Britishness, the death of multiculturalism and global concerns over international terrorism. Analysing the relevance of class, citizenship status, and regional differences, Veiled threats is a valuable addition to the burgeoning literature on Muslims in the UK post 9/11. It will be of interest to academics and students in public and social policy, race equality, gender, and faith-based policy.

What is the political allure, value and currency of emotions within contemporary cultures of governance? What does it mean to govern more humanely? Since the emergence of an emotional turn in human geography over the last decade, the notion that our emotions matter in understanding an array of social practices, spatial formations and aspects of everyday life is no longer seen as controversial. This book brings recent developments in emotional geography into dialogue with social policy concerns and contemporary issues of governance. It sets the intellectual scene for research into the geographical dimensions of the emotionalized states of the citizen, policy maker and public service worker, and highlights new research on the emotional forms of governance which now characterise public life. An international range of empirical field studies are used to examine issues of regulation, modification, governance and potential manipulation of emotional affects, professional and personal identities and political technologies. Contributors provide analysis of the role of emotional entanglements in policy strategy, policy implementation, service delivery, citizenship and participation as well as considering the emotional nature of the research process itself. It will be of interest to researchers and students within social policy, human geography, politics and related disciplines.