The Feminist Review Collective members have put together narrative fragments reflecting on their reactions to the EU referendum results and its effects. The pieces are intended to be anonymous, but…

Source: Collective Reflections on BREXIT

A Lancaster launch of the national NUS campaign “Why is my Curriculum White?” will be held next week at which all staff and students are welcome and encouraged to attend. Please circulate widely to colleagues and friends. Watch the UCL campaign video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dscx4h2l-Pk

I am saddened by the untimely death of my colleague and friend Professor John Urry. I have worked alongside John for 17 years at Lancaster. He was my mentor when I was appointed as a lecturer in 1998 and he has been the warmest, kindest and most encouraging colleague. His death will leave a gaping hole in the Sociology Department; it is impossible to imagine our staff meetings, postgraduate conferences and research events without his smiling presence. John told me that he never intended to retire as he had too much to do. A champion of civic freedom, environmental and social justice issues, John was an anti-elitist in an age increasingly dominated by global elites (the ‘offshore class’ as he called them).  He was a public sociologist, he loved twitter and he used this and other platforms to express criticism of the corrosion of democratic accountability and the erosion of the welfare state. These concerns were reflected in his recent work on inequalities, such as the global wealth gap, the concealment of wealth in tax havens (Offshoring), the inequality effects of climate change and ‘mobility-generated inequalities’. He understood that in order to confront climate change, rich societies urgently need to ‘power down’, but deepening economic inequalities make this almost impossible – therefore more equal societies are a fundamental requirement of post-oil, degrowth human futures. However, John was never a pessimist and one of his many legacies will be his enduring belief in the ability of technology, when harnessed to a sociological imagination, to tackle the most pressing social problems and bring about democratising forms of social change. I am going to miss his optimism most of all.

John and I at our joint Societies Beyond Oil and Revolting Subjects book launch in Lancaster, 2013.

The right to a dignified and independent life: Learning from The History of the Disability Rights Movement

Imogen Tyler, March 2016

‘Those who cannot work, such as the sick, aged or unemployed, are subject to a tremendous pressure to feel useless … we reject any view of ourselves as being lucky to be allowed to live’. Paul Hunt, 1966

Given the resigination of Iain Duncan Smith as work and pensions secretary, apparently in protest against £4bn of planned cuts to disability benefits – and specifically because he feels that cuts to the Personal Independence Payments (PIP) — which will replace the now defunct Independent Living Fund and Disability Living Allowance (DLA) — are “a step too far” in the Government’s austerity driven welfare reforms, it seems an apt moment to reflect on the history of disability activism which first established the rights of disabled people to a dignified and independent life–rights which while never fully realised are now in total disarray, if not fatally undermined.

As part of a research project on the politics of stigma, I have been revisting the work of the disability activist Paul Hunt (1937 – 1979). In 1966, Hunt edited a collection of essays ‘Stigma: The Experience of Disability’. Composed of essays by 12 disabled people, written to Hunt while he lived in institutional care, this is an extraordinarily powerful and ground-breaking book which documented and reflected on the stigma of living a disabled life in Britain in the 1960s. Hunt’s aim was not ‘sentimental autobiography’ and certainly not ‘charity’ (which he abhored) but on the contrary, was an attempt, drawing in particular on the US civil rights movement, to draw on personal experience as a means of jump-starting a movement for social and political change. ‘Stigma’ offered an insight into myriad problems faced by disabled people — poverty, discrimination, physical barriers, limited access to information about rights and services, deprivation of relationship and sexual rights, denial of housing, lack of access to medical services. Hunt opens his own brilliant essay in this volume with the words:

‘All my adult life has been spent in institutions amongst people who, like myself, have severe and often progressive physical disabilities. We are paralysed and deformed, most of us in wheel chairs, either as the result of accident or of diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy and polio. … In these circumstances the most acute questions arise and the most radical ‘answers’ are called for.

In 1972, he wrote a short letter to The Guardian ‘calling for “the formation of a consumer group to put forward the views of actual and potential residents” of residential institutions:

Sir,

Severely physically handicapped people find themselves in isolated unsuitable institutions where their views are ignored and they are subject to authoritarian and often cruel regimes. I am proposing the formation of a consumer group to put forward nationally the views of actual and potential residents of these successors to the Workhouse.

Yours faithfully,

Paul Hunt.

As a consequence of the many responses received to his letter, Hunt joined Disablement Income Group – which had formed in 1965 to campaign for increased state benefits for disabled people – specifically in the form of a basic and just disability income. As Vic Finkelstein, the disability activist, scholar and writer, reflected:

The emergence of DIG was an early symptom of the shifting focus away from our “defective” bodies, which we had been conditioned into believing was the sum total of our misfortune, and onto the provision of benefits to enable a more equitable lifestyle in the community regardless of type of impairment or where this was acquired. (Finkelstein, 2004:7)

In 1974, with Finkelstein, Hunt set up The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS). It was UPIAS who crafted the “social model of disability”, arguing that disability is fundamentally a political problem –people are disabled by society, not by their bodies (impairments).

While the impact and history of the UPIAS is contested (some critics argue it was too political –it was Marxist in leanings– and also exclusionary in terms of its focus on people with physical disabilities), there is no doubt that it changed the lives of disabled people across the world–and in the context of the current rolling back of disability and welfare rights its demands deserve a new hearing.

Hunt ‘escaped’ from institutional care in 1970, got married, raised a family, and all the while continued to work as a leading activist for disability rights until his death.

Below is an edited extract from the manifesto of the The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, from 1974. It is well worth a read.

UNION OF THE PHYSICALLY IMPAIRED AGAINST SEGREGATION

AIMS
The Union aims to have all segregated facilities for physically impaired people replaced by arrangements for us to participate fully in society. These arrangements must include the necessary financial, medical, technical, educational and other help required from the State to enable us to gain the maximum possible independence in daily living activities, to achieve mobility, to undertake productive work, and to live where and how we choose with full control over our lives.

POLICY STATEMENT

1. DISABILITY AND SEGREGATION
Britain today has the necessary knowledge and the advanced technology to bring physically impaired people into the mainstream of life and enable us to contribute fully to society. But instead of the Countrys resources being concentrated on basic human problems like ours, they are frequently misspent, for example, on making sophisticated weapons of destruction, and onprojects like Concorde and Centre Point. So despite the creation today of such an enormous capacity, which could help overcome disability, the way this capacity is misdirected means that many physically impaired people arestill unnecessarily barred from full participation in society. We find ourselves isolated and excluded by such things as flights of steps, inadequate public and personal transport, unsuitable housing, rigid work routines infactories and offices, and a lack of up-to-date aids and equipment.

2. There are a few individual examples of severely impaired people being able to overcome many of these barriers by the use of sufficient resources in the right way. They prove that integration is possible. But as a group we are still often forced to put up with segregated and inferior facilities. We get sent to special schools, colleges or training centres. We are systematically channelled into segregated factories, centres, Homes, hostels and clubs. If we do manage to become mobile, it is often in antiquated tricycles or specially labelled transport. All these segregated forms of help represented progress in years past. But since the means for integration now undoubtedly exists, our confinement to segregated facilities is increasingly oppressive and dehumanising.
3. RECENT ADVANCES
The struggles of disabled people and their relatives and friends, together with advances in technology and medical science, have it is true resulted in larger numbers of us participating more fully in ordinary society in recent years. Some of the barriers which segregate us have been partially overcome or dismantled. So a good proportion of people with paraplegia, or those who are blind, for example, have become able to work and to lead relatively active lives which would have been hard to imagine less than 50 years ago. These developments have meant a positive shift in the attitudes of some able-bodied people as they have responded to our presence amongst them.

4. Such advances show that general attitudes can be changed for the better. They also point to our increased participation in society as the principal means for achieving further change. But they cannot blind us to what remains the basic reality of the position of disabled people as a group. This society is based on the necessity for people to compete in the labour market in order to earn a living. To the employer of labour, the physically impaired are not usually as good a buy as the non-impaired. We therefore end up at or near the bottom of this society as an oppressed group.

5. LOW BARGAINING-POWER
When we do succeed in getting employment, our comparatively low productivity means that we have low bargaining-power when it comes to negotiating decent treatment and facilities. Our position is similar to that of many people who are middle-aged or elderly, who have had break-downs, or are mentally handicapped, black, ex-prisoners, unskilled workers, etc. We are usually among the first to lose our jobs and be cast on the scrap-heap when it suits the needs of the economy. If we are lucky we may bedrawn in again, to do the worst paid work, when business starts to boom once more. If we are unlucky, then we could face a lifetime on the degrading, means-tested poverty line. If we are very unlucky we may be consigned to a soul-destroying institution.

6. INSTITUTIONS – THE ULTIMATE HUMAN SCRAP-HEAPS
The union of the Physically Impaired believes that the reality of our positionas an oppressed group can be seen most clearly in segregated residential institutions, the ultimate human scrap-heaps of this society. Thousands of people, whose only crime is being physically impaired, are sentenced tothese prisons for life -which may these days be a long one. For the vast majority there is still no alternative, no appeal, no remission of sentence for good behaviour, no escape except the escape from life itself.
7. The cruelty, petty humiliation, and physical and mental deprivation suffered in residential institutions, where isolation and segregation have been carried to extremes, lays bare the essentially oppressive relations of this society with its physically impaired members. As in most similar places,such as special schools, there are some staff and volunteers doing their best to help the residents. But their efforts are systematically overwhelmed by the basic function of segregated institutions, which is to look after batches ofdisabled people – and in the process convince them that they cannot
realistically expect to participate fully in society and earn a good living. This function was generally appropriate when special residential institutionsfirst came into being, since in the competitive conditions of the time many physically impaired people could not even survive without their help. But now it has become increasingly possible for severely impaired people notjust to survive, but also to work and become fully integrated, the need for segregated institutions no longer exists in the way it did. They have become seriously out of step with the changed social and technological conditions of Britain today.
8. SUPPORT FOR RESIDENTS STRUGGLES
The Union of the Physically Impaired regards the neglected issues of institutions as of crucial importance in the field of disability. We therefore place great emphasis on supporting the struggles of residents in existing residential institutions for better conditions, for full control over their personal affairs, and for a democratic say in the management of their Home, Centre or Unit. The Union strongly opposes all attempts by the authorities to impose restrictions on visiting; to fix times for getting into and out of bed;to limit residents freedom to come in and go out when they wish; to enforce medical and nursing opinions, or to transfer residents to other institutions against their will.

9. The Union sees a need for a Charter which will focus on basic rights often denied when people are dependent on others for personal needs. Disabled people living in institutions will be offered help if they wish to organise locally in defence of their rights. The Union will develop an adviceand mutual-help service to assist with negotiations, formation of residents committees etc. When asked, we will mobilise support and publicity on a national basis for those involved in particular struggles.
10. ALTERNATIVES NEEDED
The Union is opposed to the building of any further segregated institutions by the State or by voluntary organisations. We believe that providing adequate services to people in their own homes is a much better use of resources. We also call urgently for the provision of non-institutional alternative housing, for example, along the lines of the Fokus scheme inSweden, which makes genuine progress towards secure, integrated, and active living for disabled people who need extensive personal help. The Union will try to assist anyone who seeks to move out – or stay out – of aninstitution. But we fully respect the feelings of individuals who regard institutional life as their best solution at the present time. We understand also that some disabled people will disagree with our views on segregation,and we hope that they will organise to put forward their arguments too.
11. REAL CHOICE
The Unions eventual object is to achieve a situation where as physically impaired people we all have the means to choose where and how we wish to live. This will involve the phasing out of segregated institutions maintained by the State or charities. While any of these institutions are maintained at ahuge cost, it is inconceivable that we will all receive in addition the full resources needed to provide us with a genuine opportunity to live as we choose. This point applies not just to residential homes, hospital units,hostels, villages and settlements, but also to other kinds of segregated facilities. As long as there are vastly expensive special schools, colleges and day-centres, heavily subsidised workshops and factories, and separate holiday camps and hotels, there can be no question of sufficient alternative provision being made to ensure that we all have a real opportunity of equal participation in normal educational, work and leisure activities.
12. DISABLEMENT OUTSIDE INSTITUTIONS
Our Union maintains that the present existence of segregated institutions and facilities is of direct relevance even for less severely impaired people whomay expect to avoid having to use them. Those of us who live outside institutions can fully understand the meaning of disability in this society only when we take account of what happens to the people who come at thebottom of our particular group. Their existence and their struggles are an
essential part of the reality of disability and to ignore them is like assessing the condition of elderly people in this society without considering theexistence of geriatric wards.
13. It is also true that the kind of prejudiced attitudes we all experience -other people being asked if we take sugar in our tea is the usual example -are related to the continued unnecessary existence of sheltered institutions.Those who participate us are indicating that they think we are not capable of participating fully and making our own decisions. They are harking back to the time when disabled people had to be sheltered much more, and theyimply that really we ought to be back in our rightful place – that is, a special
school, club, hospital unit, Home or workshop. Physically impaired people
will never be fully accepted in ordinary society while segregated institutionscontinue to exist, if only because their unnecessary survival today reinforces out of date attitudes and prejudices.
14. MEDICAL TRADITION
Both inside and outside institutions, the traditional way of dealing with disabled people has been for doctors and other professionals to decide what is best for us. It is of course a fact that we sometimes require skilledmedical help to treat our physical impairments – operations, drugs and nursing care. We may also need therapists to help restore or maintain physical function, and to advise us on aids to independence and mobility.But the imposition of medical authority, and of a medical definition of our
problems of living in society, have to be resisted strongly. First and foremost we are people, not patients, cases, spastics, the deaf, the blind, wheelchairs or the sick.

Our Union rejects entirely any idea of medical or other experts having the right to tell us how we should live, or withholding information from us, or take decisions behind our backs.
15 We reject also the whole idea of experts and professionals holding forth on how we should accept our disabilities, or giving learned lectures about the psychology of disablement. We already know what it feels like to be poor, isolated, segregated, done good to, stared at, and talked down to – far better than any able-bodied expert. We as a Union are not interested in descriptions of how awful it is to be disabled. What we are interested in, are ways of changing our conditions of life, and thus overcoming the disabilities which are imposed on top our physical impairments by the way this society is organised to exclude us. In our view, it is only the actual impairment which we must accept; the additional and totally unnecessary problems caused by the way we are treated are essentially to be overcome and not accepted. We look forward to the daywhen the army of experts on our social and psychological problems can find more productive work.
16. THE RIGHT KIND OF HELP
We know that as a small, weak, minority group, disabled people cannot achieve a fully human life by their own efforts alone. We need and welcome the help of sympathetic able-bodied people. But the basic problem we faceis our exclusion from full social participation. It follows that this oppressive situation can be put right only by disabled people actually taking a more active part in society. The efforts of professionals and other able-bodied people are therefore really constructive only when they build on and encourage the self-help and activity of disabled people themselves. This is why our energies as a Union will be directed mainly towards discussion and common action with other disabled people. Neither we as a Union, nor able-bodied people, can solve other disabled peoples problems for them. Those problems will be correctly tackled precisely to the extent that we all asdisabled people become involved and active in our own rehabilitation.
17. THE NEED FOR A UNION
Disabled people everywhere are already struggling against their isolation,segregation and other forms of oppression. Every day each of us has to face our own individual problems. And we are now increasingly getting together in groups to tackle more effectively the problems we find we havein common. This is shown by the vast growth of disability organisations in the last 25 years in Britain. Our Union takes this process of coming together a stage further. We are not restricted to one aspect of physical disability(e.g. mobility or incomes), nor to people with one medical diagnosis, nor to
those in one locality. The Union exists simply to offer help to all physically impaired people in the fight to change the conditions of life which oppress us and to realise our full human potential.

Adopted: 03/12/74

We are glad to share the news of a forthcoming Sociological Review Monograph to be edited by Imogen Tyler and Tom Slater, which, all being well, will be published early in 2018. it will include articles by Imogen Tyler, Tom Slater, Jenna Loyd, Anne Bonds, Lynne Friedli, Joanna Latimer, Brigit McWade, João Queirós, Virgilio Borges Pereira, Graham Scambler, Dayna Keene and Gergő Pulay.

Stigma is currently one of the most used but least developed of sociological concepts. This special issue aims to revitalise sociological debates about what stigma is, and the role of stigma in the formation and governance of contemporary societies. We anticipate that this special issue will have considerable appeal to readers of The Sociological Review, and hope it will make a defining contribution to the journal and the discipline.

Scholarship on stigma has been dominated by psychologists. This special issue will wrest stigma away from the individualism and a-historical frame of psychology, returning stigma to sociology through a focus on questions of history, power, capital, value, inequality, culture, ‘race’, disability and social governance.  Through theoretical innovation and detailed empirical case studies of stigma in a range of settings, this issue will be an an essential resource for graduate and postgraduate students, but will also engage policy makers and practitioners/activists, opening up new questions and avenues of research.

Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity [1963] transformed understandings of the social function of stigma. Proceeding from a definition of stigma as ‘the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance’ (1990: 9), Goffman explored what a burgeoning psychological literature on stigma might ‘yield for sociology’ (1990: 9). Fifty years after its publication, Goffman’s Stigma remains the most influential treatise on the social function of stigma. It has been pivotal in the development of practical initiatives designed to combat social stigma, for example in programmes designed to reduce the social stigma of conditions such as HIV and AIDS. Since Stigma was published, social and political movements, such as the LGBT and disability rights, have transformed public perceptions and understandings of what might have been considered “spoiled” or “deviant” bodies and behaviours. However, despite sometimes successful practical applications of Goffman’s work, it is striking how little sociological understandings of stigmatisation have developed within the intervening period. Further, it has been argued that Goffman’s interactionist approach to stigma has the effect of neutralizing the social and historical materials he draws upon (see Jameson, 1976). For example, Goffman wrote Stigma during a critical period the black civil rights movement in the US, but while he examines racial stigma, he doesn’t reflect on how social and political upheavals effected by movements for the equality of black humanity might trouble the stigma of “racialised interactions” or consider how stigma is a fundamentally racializing force (see Loyd and Bonds). Moreover, recent research has questioned the effectiveness and politics of (some) anti-stigma initiatives (see Haslam et. al. 2006, Pescosolido and Martin 2015)(see McWade). This troubling of normativity also speak to a longer series of theoretical debates in critical race studies feminist and queer theory, which variously argue against the limited terms of “inclusion” on offer from institutions, states, corporate agents and their mediating agencies. Within these alternative traditions of stigma thinking, there is a concern with reclaiming stigma ‘as a pivotal arena for the politics emanating from different traditions of the oppressed’ (Weheliye 2014, p. 2, see Tyler, McWade and Latimer)

This monograph develops out of the shared research interests of the two editors on the role of stigma in (re)producing social inequalities and injustices in the context of neoliberal capitalism. It aims to bring together sociological research on poverty, racism, disability, stigma and shame, with geographical perspectives on the activation of stigma at different scales (governmental, policy, media industries), recent scholarship on the stigma of place (see Slater, Queirós & Pereira, Keene and Pulay) and analyses of anti-stigma campaigns. In doing, it draws together articles from scholars writing from different global locations and perspectives, variously concerned with stigma as a mechanism of social disenfranchisement in numerous forms and on multiple scales. While the broader literature, particularly the social psychological literature, on stigma is vast in scope, what distinguishes this monograph is its specific focus on stigma as a mode of social governmentality. There have been attempts within social psychology to address the ‘decidedly individualistic focus’ (Link & Phelan, 2001: 366) of existing stigma research. However, this has been hampered by a limited understanding of ‘power’: where power is imagined primarily as a force exercised by individuals – ‘the aims of stigmatizers’ (2014: 24) – rather than conceptualised vis-à-vis the motives of, for example, class-interests, institutions and corporations within a broader unequal political economy of neoliberal capitalist accumulation. Hence, a specific aim of this monograph is to consider how stigma is activated in order to govern populations. This approach has been inspired by Loïc Wacquant’s argument that one of the major characteristics of neoliberalism is conditions of heightened stigmatization for minority subjects ‘in daily life as well as in public discourse’ (2008: 24–5). This argument is supported by research, for example John Hills and Peter Taylor-Gooby in the UK, have detailed a growing stigmatisation of poverty (Taylor-Gooby, 2013; Hills, 2015). Similarly, the ESRC-funded project, ‘Shame, social exclusion and the effectiveness of anti-poverty programmes: A Study of Seven Countries’ (2010-2012) details a marked shift from policies concerned with alleviating poverty shame, to forms of policy making designed to activate stigma in ways which ‘support the unequal distribution of resources in society’ (Walker, 2015, see Friedli below). This monograph seeks to further explicate and examine the role of stigma as as integral form of power and governance in advanced capitalist societies.

Working Titles of articles/chapters:

Neoliberal Stigma Power, Imogen Tyler

The Invention of the ‘Sink Estate’: Stigma and Symbolic Power in English Urban Regeneration, Tom Slater.

Where Do Black Lives Matter?: Race, Stigma, and Place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,  Jenna M. Loyd & Anne Bonds.

Stigmatising the resistance: the role of psychology in state attacks on “refusal to work” Lynne Friedli

Repelling neoliberal world-making: aging, biopolitics and irresponse-ability, Joanna Latimer

Madness, distress and refusing anti-stigma campaigns, Brigit McWade

Working class youth transitions to adulthood: the impact of territorial stigmatization among young social housing residents in the city of Porto, João Queirós and Virgilio Borges Pereira

Stigma: sign or symptom? A frame for change, Graham Scambler

Prison Stigma and the Decency of Home, Danya Keene

Territorial stigmatization at the margins of the postsocialist urban periphery:  Lessons from Romania, Gergő Pulay

reblogged from a guest post i did for justiceforlb.org @justiceforlb, with thanks to Dr George Julian for formatting and editing, and Sara Ryan for feedback.

Connor Sparrowhawk, the erosion of accountability and the administrative grotesque

by Imogen Tyler and Jenna Loyd, also published on Open Democracy

This is my family.

Baba, mama, baby all washed up on the shore. This is 28 shoeless survivors and thousands of bodies.

Bodies Syrian, Bodies Somali, Bodies Afghan, Bodies Ethiopian, Bodies Eritrean. Bodies Palestinian.

Jehan Bsesio, ‘No Search, No Rescue’, 2015.

Ursula Le Guin’s dystopian novel The Dispossessed (1974) is set on a moon called Anarres, where an anarchist community established itself after breaking away from the capitalist mother-planet Urras. During a history lesson, children in Anarres are shown archival film footage of a beach on Urras, which speaks to the horrific visual iconography of contemporary Europe. The film’s voiceover provides a commentary upon the images in the film:

“Bodies of children dead of starvation and disease are burned on the beaches. On the beaches of Tius, seven hundred kilometres away … women kept for the sexual use of male members of the propertied class lie on the sand all day until dinner is served to them by people of the unpropertied class”.  A close-up of dinnertime; soft mouths champing and smiling, smooth hands reaching out for delicacies wetly mounded in silver bowls. Then a switch back to the blind blunt face of a dead child, mouth open, empty, black, dry. “Side by side,” the quiet voice … said. (Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974).

Reading the news this summer has involved negotiating similarly jarring images: people desperately paddling towards Mediterranean beaches on overloaded dinghies while tourists sunbathe amidst the flotsam of failed crossings, and the growing piles of discarded lifejackets. In contemporary Europe, previously segregated images of tourists and migrants are now captured within the same visual frame. ‘It is surreal’, Greek photojournalist Yannis Behrakis commented, witnessing the ‘migrants arriving on the beach each day among tourists and posh hotels’.

This year alone, we know that at least 500,000 people have made their way to Europe by perilous sea-crossings, and an estimated 3000 of these have drowned en route. Let’s be clear, the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ is actually a crisis of international borders, neocolonialism, and imperialism. European border-control policies turn voyages to safety, freedom, and opportunity into treacherous and sometimes fatal journeys. As one British journalist notes “They were murdered. Actually, they were massacred. The policy stipulated they should be left to die. So they died”.

British news media perspectives on these Mediterranean beach scenes have swayed between apparently distinct poles of xenophobia and humanitarianism. For example, newspapers have featured many stories about family holidays ruined by ‘thousands of boat people from Syria and Afghanistan’ who have turned the Greek islands into ‘disgusting hell hole[s]’.

As families…relax on sun loungers on the beach, just a yards away scores of migrants have set up camp, sleeping on cardboard boxes with rubbish strewn everywhere. Anne Servante, a nurse from Manchester, had come to Kos expecting a relaxing break with her husband Tony, a retired plumber. Instead her summer break has turned into a nightmare as penniless migrants who are in Greece to claim asylum sit outside their restaurant and watch them eat.

In this story, we are directed to read the figures of ‘Anne’ and ‘Tony’ as respectable, hard-working people, while ‘the boat people’ and ‘penniless migrants’ living in a ‘rubbish strewn’ camp are rendered as ‘human waste’. This kind of language classifies and devalues, drawing distinctions between those whose lives are of value and those who are dispensable.

Alongside this genre of racist reportage, there are stories of ‘humanitarian tourist heroes’, like Sandra Tsiligeridu, ‘a former Greek model’, who rescued a Syrian man, Mohammed Besmar, on her way back from a snorkelling trip. Tsiligeridu ‘was cruising back to the Greek holiday island of Kos with family and friends […] when she spotted something out of place in the sea up ahead. A pair of hands appeared to be waving at her from the deep-blue waters of the Aegean Sea’. These adventure stories are concerned with relating the redemption of the European saviour. Journalists report Tsiligeridu as saying, “‘Before I met Mohammed I was angry and sad at the scenes I saw on television. I asked myself “Why do they come here?” “Now I understand the value of human life”. As Teju Cole wryly notes, ‘the white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening’.

These two genres of reporting (humanitarian/saviour and racist/xenophobia) often appear alongside each other in the same newspapers. Flipsides of the same coin they both represent and shape European perspectives on the current crisis at the borders, in which migrants are imagined as alien others, whether ‘deserving refugees’ or ‘illegal migrants’. In both registers the agency, knowledge, and collective capacities of people who have been dispossessed from their homes and livelihoods from European-backed wars and destructive economic policies.

In response to overt and implicit anti-migrant racism in coverage of the life and death struggles taking place at Europe’s borders, there have been calls for more care in how this unprecedented exodus of people is described and represented. This has led to what one BBC news headline describes as a ‘battle over the words used to describe migrants’. In August, the Director of News at Al Jazeera issued a directive to journalists to stop using the term ‘migrants’ to describe people crossing into Europe, because it has ‘evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises and distances’. Indeed, the consequence of the stigmatisation of the term “migrant” has been palpable in European news reporting, as Barry Malone, the online editor at Al Jazeera notes:

It is not hundreds of people who drown when a boat goes down in the Mediterranean, nor even hundreds of refugees. It is hundreds of migrants. It is not a person… It is a migrant. A nuisance.

The logic behind Al Jazeera’s decision is that the term ‘refugee’ has a specific international legal genealogy enshrined in the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. However, this rationale fails to recognise the fundamental erosion of both the legal status and popular meaning of the terms refugee and asylum-seeker in contemporary Europe, which has accompanied the tightening of legal migration channels. Since the 1990s European and other wealthy states have shirked their international obligations as signatories to the 1951 convention through creating new legal classifications that diminish refugee rights. For example, the small number of Syrian refugees which Britain has agreed to house will be granted ‘humanitarian protection status’ for five years, after which time they will either need to apply to remain longer, leave, or be forcibly deported. In other words, Britain is actually accepting no Syrian refugees at all.  As we write, it is unclear whether Germany will accept Syrians as refugees, or, like the UK, will also offer only time-limited protection and leave-to-remain.

Further, Europe and other wealthy countries in the world have implemented policies and programmes designed to keep refugees at bay so they cannot land to make asylum-claims. These include the proliferation of regional and transnational deterrence measures, such as the off-shoring of detention facilities and other nefarious arrangements with transit states, which ‘block safe and legal routes’ of travel in order to prevent people from arriving to make asylum-claims.  The Hungarian government, for example, ‘has invested more than 100 million euros on razor-wire fencing and border controls’ transforming itself into what Amnesty International describe as ‘a refugee protection free zone’.

In September the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) launched a #WordsMatter campaign in response to what the BBC is calling  ‘battle over the words used to describe migrants’.  In a film to accompany the campaign, celebrities explain the UNHCR distinction between a refugee and a migrant hinges on ‘choice’: a migrant chooses to move, while a refugee has no choice, is fleeing persecution. While the campaign is intended to destigmatise the term refugee, like the depictions of vacationing Europeans encountering refugees, the UN video depicts refugees as passive: they are both invisible and voiceless in this film, ventriloquized by celebrity talking heads. The false distinction between refugees who are ‘forced to leave’ and migrants who have ‘chosen’ to cross borders renders refugees ‘as dependent, apolitical non-agents’. The insistence on distinct differences between classes of people on the move mystifies the ‘historical forces, politics, power, hegemony, economic exploitation and colonialism’ that dispossess people from their homes and livelihoods. (Hence the call of self-organising refugees in Kurdistan to ‘Forget the UN!’.)

We can see the impact of this distinction between deserving and undeserving migrants in the fragile political consensus that something must be done for Syrians (authentic refugees), whilst those who have made perilous journeys from ‘forgotten conflicts’ in Africa (Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Gambia), South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh), or the Western Balkans (Kosovo, Albania) are classified and criminalised as economic migrants. Hence the ‘growing concern among some migrants and aid officials that the new policies might unwittingly divide the migrants into two distinct classes—with two different kinds of welcomes’. What is actually happening is a more general ‘competitive downgrading of refugee protection standards’ in ways that sustain deeper global divides in wealth, rights, and well-being.

We should be wary of those who insist, in the words of British historian and journalist Tim Stanley, that ‘it is down to the state in which they have arrived to define what they are’. The ‘what’ in this sentence is chilling, a reminder of the ways in which the bureaucratic classification of people operates through what Alexander Wehelyie terms ‘racial assemblages’: the socio-political processes through which humanity is disciplined into ‘humans, non-quite-humans, and nonhumans’ (2014: 8).

The school children on Anarres are not shocked by the film they watch. It transpires that this is a tired lesson and they speculate amongst themselves about whether life on Urras is as ‘disgusting, immoral [and] excremental’ as their teachers would lead them believe. Yet, when the protagonist of The Dispossessed visits Urras as an adult, he discovers precisely the world of ‘commonplace horrors’ he was taught about as a child. So horrific is the inhumanity he witnesses, that he has no language, no words, with which to comprehend and describe it. The lesson here is that when the violence of inequality becomes ordinary, we can no longer comprehend it or imagine alternatives. For Europeans, photographs and television footage of migrant arrivals, of rescues at sea, of overloaded boats, discarded life-jackets, lost objects and dead children on Mediterranean beaches are rapidly becoming commonplace horrors.

The political response to build higher walls and fences, to build prisons and camps, and accelerate deportations will only exacerbate the vulnerabilities faced by 60 million displaced people, that is ‘1 in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum’ (UNHCR, June 2015). The movement of people is not the problem, the violence of global apartheid is the problem. Global apartheid more accurately describes the refugee crisis we are witnessing. Global apartheid, a language of apart-ness, relies on stigmatization and racialization to produce seemingly natural differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’. This language operates in tandem with practices of physical segregation, fortification and militarization of boundaries, detention and expulsion.

In conclusion then, we need to fight for refugee rights, but, taking a cue from the political allegories of Le Guin’s science fiction we also need to nurture more radical alternative perspectives on this crisis in order to see its strangeness and its horror. As Yanis Varoufakis put in on a recent television debate about the refugee crisis in Europe, ‘looked at from space…borders are an absurdity’ (BBC Question Time, 24 Sep 2015).

I am honoured to have been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize, which means that from September 2015 I will have some relief from my day job (teaching and administration) for two years to focus on my new research project on stigma and inequalities. Below I outline the initial research questions, aims and hopeful outcomes of this research.

This wordpress site will be used to document the project as it evolves over the next three years.

For the initial 18mths, I will be supported in this research by Dr Brigit McWade, an expert in disability studies, who will be developing her own post-doctoral research on mental health, stigma and madness in neoliberal times (see forthcoming blog posts by Brigit on her project).

Imogen Tyler, September 7th 2015

The Sociology of Stigma: Why research stigma today?

All the major institutions of ‘free-market’ capitalism have warned that escalating inequalities (of income, health, education and citizenship) pose the gravest threat to future social and political stability. The premise of this project is that to combat this threat we require a much better understanding of relationship between stigmatisation, inequalities and neoliberal capitalism—that is we urgently need to theorise stigma as a cultural and political economy.

Stigma is one of the most frequently used but least developed concepts in the social sciences. Although stigma is employed to describe a vast array of scapegoating practices and shameful identities, deeper theoretical understandings of stigma are frequently absent from sociological analysis.

Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity [1963] transformed understandings of the social function of stigma. Proceeding from a definition of stigma as ‘the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance’ (1990: 9), Goffman explored what a burgeoning psychological literature on stigma might ‘yield for sociology’ (1990: 9). Experiences of stigma, Goffman argued, are ‘one of the primal scenes of sociology’ as moments of ‘direct confrontation’ with the social norms in operation in a given context (13). Goffman made four central claims: firstly that ‘the stigmatized are not persons but rather perspectives […] that are generated in social contexts’ (1990: 138). Secondly, people manage the shame of stigma by employing multiple strategies of passing, concealment and refusal. Thirdly, and this is more implicit in his work, that stigmatisation is historically specific in the forms it takes (ibid.); and finally, that stigma functions ‘as a means of formal social control’ (139).

Fifty years after its publication, Goffman’s Stigma remains the most influential treatise on the social function of stigma. Goffman’s work has been pivotal in the development of practical initiatives designed to combat social stigma, for example in programmes designed to reduce the social stigma of conditions such as HIV and AIDS, and in the area of mental health and disability policy development and activism. Since Stigma was published, social and political movements, such as the disability rights movement, have transformed public perceptions and understandings of what might have been considered ‘deviant’ or ‘marked’ bodies and behaviours. However, despite these sometimes successful practical applications of Goffman’s work, it is striking how little sociological understandings of stigmatisation have developed within the intervening period.

Anti-Anti Stigma Campaigns

Furthermore, recent research has questioned the effectiveness and politics of (some) anti-stigma initiatives (see for example Haslam et. al. 2006, Pescosolido and Martin 2015). Mental health scholars and activists began to question the meaning and effects of anti-stigma campaigns altogether, and in 2013 ran a ‘Hands off our Stigma’ campaign (Spandler et. al 2013). These activist attempts to re-work and refuse the normative inclusive logic of anti-stigma campaigns, (which often reproduce the stigma they seek to diminish), are a reminder of the complexity of cultural and social struggles around stigma. These events also speak to a longer series of theoretical debates in critical race studies (see for example Cohen 2004) and in queer theory (see for example Warner 2000, Dugan 2004), which variously argue for “a politics of deviance” (Cohen 2004) against the limited “terms of inclusion” on offer from the state and corporate media culture.

The changing role and function of stigma in neoliberal societies:

The historical, geopolitical and theoretical context out of which our interest in stigma emerges is a very different one than that of the post-war society which confronted Goffman in the 1950s. In returning to Stigma, fifty years after its initial publication, we will consider in what ways a re-conceptualization of stigma can assist with illuminating pressing questions of social decomposition, inequality and injustice.

This return to the sociology of stigma is shaped by the specific historical context of neoliberalism, including the current hegemony of free market economic thinking within mainstream politics and accompanying forms of austerity-driven welfare reforms.

In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), Naomi Klein details the ways in which ‘the policy trinity’ of neoliberalism, ‘the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending’ has been enabled through the invention and/or exploitation of crises, be they natural disasters, terrorist attacks. Drawing on Klein’s analysis this research aims to develop a nuanced account of “the ways in which neoliberal modes of government operate not only by capitalizing upon ‘shocks’ but through the daily, pervasive production and mediation of stigma” (Tyler, 2013: 2010). The activation of stigma is central to the proliferation of fears about border controls and terror threats, economic insecurity and labour precariousness. As I argued in Revolting Subjects, “in such a climate public anxieties and hostilities are channelled towards those groups within the population, such as the unemployed, homeless people, welfare recipients, irregular migrants, disabled people, ill and elderly populations who are imagined to be a parasitical drain upon scarce resources” (Tyler, 2013: 2011).

The centrality of stigma in producing economic and social inequalities has been obscured ‘because bodies of research pertaining to specific stigmatized statuses have generally developed in separate domains’ (Hatzenbuehler, 2013). In short, stigma is widely accepted to be a major factor in determining life chances, yet research on stigma is fragmented and dispersed across academic disciplines.

This research project will address this lacuna and to consider the relationship between growing inequalities and ‘heightened stigmatization in daily life and public discourse’ (Wacquant, 2010). Indeed, what distinguishes this project from existing research on stigma is its explicit focus on stigma and power, and stigmatization as a central dimension of neoliberal state-crafting.

A specific concern is with the ways in which stigma is activated in order to govern populations through the production of norms, through stigmatising classifications and co-currently, stigma as a practice of social classification (Tyler 2015).

This project will focus in particular on contemporary ‘sites of shame’ in the context of austerity, welfare reform and the ‘migrant’ crisis in Europe, Key themes will include: the neoliberal de/recomposition of class, deepening inequalities and poverty, work and precarity, sexual violence, disabilities, borders, citizenship and the differential value of human lives.

The project has the following aims:

• develop a new social theory/sociology of stigma as a cultural political economy
• examine the relationship between stigmatisation and escalating inequalities
• analyze the relationship between stigma and mass mediation (the centrality of media culture to neoliberal governance)
• consider ‘behaviour change’ policies through the lens of stigma (see Rhys Jones et al 2013, and Lynne Friedli’s work in this area).
• deepen understanding of the role of stigma in generating a ‘post-welfare’ consensus (see Jamie Peck for an account of post-welfare)

Outcomes from this project will include:

• A monograph: Stigma Nation (provisional title)·
• A special journal issue: ‘Sociology of Stigma’ (to be edited with Tom Slater) and an edited book
• Three peer-reviewed articles
• The establishment of an interdisciplinary research network on Stigma & Inequality

Recent Related Publications by Imogen

draft proofs of most articles can be accessed at https://lancaster.academia.edu/imogentyler

Imogen Tyler (2013) Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (Zed)

Imogen Tyler and Katarzyna Marciniak (2014) ‘The human waste disposal industry or immigrant protest in neoliberal times’ in Katarzyna Marciniak and Imogen Tyler (eds)  Immigrant protest: politics, aesthetics, and everyday dissent, SUNY 2015

Imogen Tyler, Nick Gill,  Deirdre Conlon & Ceri Oeppen (2014), ‘The business of child detention : charitable co-option, migrant advocacy and activist outrage, Race and Class, 56 (1): 3-21.

Kim Allen, Imogen Tyler and Sara De Benedictis (2014) ‘Thinking with ‘White Dee’: The Gender Politics of ‘Austerity Porn’, Sociological Research Online, 19 (3), 2. DOI: 10.5153/sro.3439

Imogen Tyler (2015) ‘Welcome to Britain: anti-immigrant populism and the asylum invasion complex’ Eurozine [special issue ‘Beyond Fortress Europe’] see also ‘Wasted lives in UK immigration detention’ Open Democracy (2013) https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/imogen-tyler/wasted-lives-in-uk-immigration-detention

Imogen Tyler (2015) ‘Classificatory struggles: class, culture and inequality in neoliberal times’, The Sociological Review, 63(2):493–511 DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12296.

Tracey Jensen and Imogen Tyler (2015) ‘Benefits broods’: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense’, Critical Policy Studies, 25, doi: 10.1177/0261018315600835

Imogen Tyler and Bruce Bennett (2015) ‘Against Aspiration’ in What is aspiration?: how progressives should respond (The Centre for Labour and Social studies)

Imogen Tyler and Jenna Loyd (2015) ‘From Tottenham to Baltimore, policing crisis starts race to the bottom for justice’, The Conversation/ OpenDemocracy https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/imogen-tyler-jenna-lloyd/from-tottenham-to-baltimore-policing-crisis-starts-race-to-bot