Bringing attention to fuel poverty as a distinct manifestation of social inequality has asserted the place of affordable warmth in the profile of contemporary rights and entitlements. As such, fuel ...poverty can be understood as an expression of injustice, involving the compromised ability to access energy services and thereby to secure a healthful living environment. In this paper, we consider how fuel poverty may be aligned to various alternative concepts of social and environmental justice. Whilst recognising that fuel poverty is fundamentally a complex problem of distributive injustice, we argue that other understandings of injustice are also implicated and play important roles in producing and sustaining inequalities in access to affordable warmth. Addressing fuel poverty has to involve seeking justice in terms of the cultural and political recognition of vulnerable and marginalised social groups and pursuing procedural justice through opening up involvement and influence in decision-making processes. We make this argument both in theoretical terms, and through considering the experience of fuel poverty advocacy and policy development in the UK. Opportunities for future action may be illuminated through such interconnected justice framings as wider awareness of energy, climate and poverty issues emerge.
► We examine fuel poverty through different concepts of social and environmental justice. ► UK experience is used to inform and exemplify our analysis. ► Distributional justice is central but insufficient on its own. ► Procedural justice and justice as recognition are key necessary goals in the struggle for affordable warmth.
This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. ...The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.
Faith stories Hickey-Moody, Anna
Manchester University Press eBooks,
2023
eBook
Odprti dostop
This book explores the contention that religious and non-religious people have more in common than we might expect. Anna Hickey-Moody argues that everyone has faith in something and faith is what ...makes us human. People are both brought together and driven apart by their orientations towards religion and secularism. Across England and Australia, Anna Hickey-Moody has collected community stories about ‘what really matters’ and what people have faith in. Her findings will take you on many journeys: voyages of escape on small boats, trips into the future in electric cars and art-making on school grounds. Chapters examine how faith can increase and/or reduce people’s capacity to act, how it can lead to a deferral of pleasure and a faith in things yet to come. They also explore outsider’s worlds: the structures of belonging that sustain social and culturally marginalised people, the kinds of connections fostered through faith and the forms of refusal that faith systems often bring with them. The final chapter examines the other worlds that are created through prayer and creative practice. This book will be of interest to those working in affect studies, religious studies, cultural studies, ethnography, youth studies and sociology.
Understanding and addressing the consequences of partisan animosity requires knowledge of its foundations. To what extent is animosity between partisan groups motivated by dislike for partisan ...outgroups per se, policy disagreement, or other social group conflicts? In many circumstances, including extant experimental research, these patterns are observationally equivalent. In a series of vignette evaluation experiments, we estimate effects of shared partisanship when additional information is or is not present, and we benchmark these effects against shared policy preference effects. Partisanship effects are about 71% as large as shared policy preference effects when each is presented in isolation. When an independently randomized party and policy position are presented together, partisanship effects decrease substantially, by about 52%, whereas policy effects remain large, decreasing by about 10%. These results suggest that common measures of partisan animosity may capture programmatic conflict more so than social identity-based partisan hostility.
Emotional tears are vehicles for bonding between individuals, even with those belonging to different social categories. Yet, little is known about the reactions they provoke toward members of ...underprivileged groups such as immigrants or the explanatory mechanisms of their effects. Across three experiments (with 546 adults) using standardized images of emotional displays, we tested the effects of tears on cognitive inferences (of warmth and competence) and self-reported affective responses (such as compassion or discomfort), and both directly and indirectly on self-reported prosocial behavioral intentions toward an immigrant male. Compared with nontearful (i.e., neutral and sad) expressions, observers perceived a tearful immigrant as warmer but not as less competent (except for study 3). They also felt more compassion (but not discomfort) and were more willing to offer an immigrant person emotional (i.e., to approach and comfort) and instrumental support (i.e., to donate money to an organization helping immigrants but not volunteer their time). Inferred warmth and felt compassion (or compassion-related emotions) explained the effects of tears on emotional support and donation intentions. This research highlights the need to study emotion expression in the context of interethnic and, more broadly, intergroup relations and the effects of emotional tears beyond the willingness to provide immediate assistance. We also discuss implications that tears might have for promoting different types of solidarity with members of underprivileged groups such as immigrants.
Social affordances of agile governance Mergel, Ines
PAR. Public administration review/Public administration review,
September/October 2024, Letnik:
84, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Agile refers to a work management ideology with a set of productivity frameworks that support continuous and iterative progress on work tasks by reviewing one's hypotheses, working in a human‐centric ...way, and encouraging evidence‐based learning. In practice, public administrations have started to use agile principles and methods to plan projects, work in short sprints, iterate after receiving feedback from stakeholders, and apply a human‐centric approach to arrive at prototyped solutions. To understand the opportunities and challenges public servants perceive when they are asked to apply agile work practices, I conducted focus groups to study the social affordances of agile governance that need to be in place for public servants to adopt an agile mindset and its related practices. As a result of the exposure to agile work practices, public servants are either able to perceive its affordances and are willing to adopt agile, they falsely perceive them or they even remain hidden from them leading to a rejection of agile.
Cet article se propose d’analyser le délitement des liens sociaux engendrés par les enjeuxfonciers autour de la forêt classée de Bossématié (FCB) dans la Sous-préfecture d’Abengourou.Il s’est agi à ...partir d’entretiens individuels et de groupe avec les acteurs relevant des différentes catégories sociales (infiltrés burkinabé, autochtones agni et allochtones) de saisir les logiques d’infiltration allogènes et leurs incidences sur la sécurité foncière au sein de la FCB et dans les localités environnantes. Les résultats obtenus indiquent qu’il y a une divergence d’interprétation de la FCB tant par les infiltrés burkinabé que par les nationaux (autochtones agni et allochtones). Cette divergence d’interprétation entraine une crise du lien social entre ces deux groupes sociaux.
Fiction has a major social impact, not least because it co-shapes the image that society has of various social groups. Drawing on a collection of 170 contemporary Dutch-language novels, Character ...Constellations presents a range of data-driven, statistical models to study depictions of characters in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and other identity categories. Incorporating the tools of network analysis, each chapter highlights an aspect of fictional social networks that affects the representation of social groups: their centrality, their communities, and their conflicts. While reading individual novels in light of emerging statistical patterns, combining the formal methods of social network analysis with the interpretive tools of narratology, this study shows how central societal themes such as (in)equality and emancipation, integration and segregation, and social mobility and class struggle are foregrounded, replicated, or distorted in the Dutch novel. Showcasing what character-based critiques of literary representation gain by integrating data-driven methods into the practice of critical close reading, Character Constellations contributes to societal debates on cultural representation and identity and the role fiction and art have in those debates.