State Austerity Research Articles

Informal arts engagement programs in disadvantaged schools: student aspirations and creative limits

ABSTRACT It is widely argued that the arts have a range of cultural, economic, and educational benefits. However, under state austerity arts curricula are devalued in favour of industry skills. To address this gap in arts education, a new type of student focussed informal arts engagement program has emerged. This article draws on a qualitative study of disadvantaged Australian secondary students’ experience of an arts engagement program and explores their experiences through Bourdieusian concepts. We observe how students’ homologous position allowed an immediate appreciation of the arts and note how their habitus frame the arts as ‘work’ and as a technical accomplishment. An illusio in the arts as career emerged from these understandings. We suggest informal arts programs act as a collective gift within a weak cycle of reciprocity, but without expanded in-school opportunities fall short in offering students new ways of understanding the place and value of the arts.

Make work methodology: Canadian homelessness research and its role in austerity

Observations from the frontlines of the Canadian homelessness research community demonstrate that it largely constitutes ‘make-work’: activities carried out to keep busy and thus, perpetuate the non-profit sector and maintain the status quo. It achieves this through its conceptualization of socio-economic issues and selection of acceptable questions—essentially, through its methodological decisions—which do little to challenge the forces that dispossess and displace people. The resulting policy and programmatic responses promote widely-accepted cost-saving ‘solutions’ to homelessness, and thus, state austerity, which ultimately deepens poverty. The cycle of make-work continues. Instead of upholding a private, competitive ‘population management industry,’ how can we produce knowledge that directly supports resistance to the common struggle of housing deprivation? Inverting the dominant methodology means accounting for who created, perpetuates and benefits from the housing crisis, not accounting for austerity’s sake.

Psychiatry on a Shoestring: West Africa and the Global Movements of Deinstitutionalization.

The rise of psychiatric deinstitutionalization policies in the formerly colonized world is commonly narrated as a novel and decolonial intervention imparted by Euro-American NGOs of the global mental health era of the past two decades. By contrast, this article uncovers the history of a British imperial push for deinstitutionalization that originated in West Africa in the 1930s-decades prior to the rise of global mental health policies. Colonial austerity measures, combined with British officials' observations of West African ethno-psychiatric healing practices, motivated an empire-wide policy favoring family and community care over institutional treatment for most mentally distressed colonial subjects. Global mental health policies that ideologically sanction state austerity measures for the mentally ill through community care are neither new nor decolonial. They remake colonial-era mandates for public services to operate on shoestring budgets.

From Dictatorship to “Democracy”: Neoliberal Continuity and Its Crisis in Tunisia

A decade after Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution in 2011, this article assesses Tunisia’s neoliberal political economy from a critical and historical perspective; from Ben Ali to its current political and economic impasse. It argues that despite the country being shown as the only democratic example to have emerged from the “Arab Spring”, the continuity of neoliberalism puts significant limits on its democratisation. Domestic and international ruling classes insisted on the implementation of further neoliberal reforms since the 2010s which curbed democratic processes, interventions and demands. Hence, despite limited democratic reform in the political sphere initially, it is not plausible to argue that the post-2010 era delivered the demands of the masses that led to the ousting of Ben Ali. In recent years, the country has experienced significant economic and political crises accompanied by deep societal unrest and labour resistance. Indeed, high unemployment persists, inflation and the cost of living have worsened, foreign debt has soared, wages have remained stagnant and state austerity is prescribed by the country’s creditors. This leaves the future of Tunisia’s political economy uncertain and crisis-prone, and makes the case for a break away from neoliberalism an urgent necessity.

‘Benefits broods’: The cultural and political crafting of anti-welfare commonsense

In the aftermath of the global banking crises, a political economy of permanent state austerity has emerged, driven by and legitimated through a hardening anti-welfare commonsense. We argue that, while there is an excellent evidence base emerging around solidifying negative public attitudes towards welfare, critical policy studies needs to attend to the cultural as well as the political economies through which an anti-welfare commonsense is formed and legitimated. We adopt a ‘cultural political economy’ approach to examine the cultural and political crafting of ‘benefit brood’ families within the wider public sphere, to examine the mechanisms through which anti-welfare sentiments are produced and mediated. Through a case study of Mick Philpott, we demonstrate how ‘benefits broods’ operate both as technologies of control (through which to manage precariat populations), but also as technologies of consent through which a wider and deeper anti-welfare commonsense is effected.

Economy and Power in the Soviet Union, 1917–39

The ongoing crisis of global economic system has once again rendered visible power of economy to structure everyday human existence. From budgetary shortfalls to state austerity programs, concerns over monetary stability to persistent structural unemployment, present crisis has reasserted primacy of economic at global and local levels. It has also resuscitated a language about economy--including anxiety over devaluation, speculation, nationalization, socialization, and austerity--that seemingly had been consigned to dustbin of history. The rediscovery of power of economy is, of course, a surprising development only in most nearsighted and localized of historical perspectives. Systemic economic disequilibrium and specter of market-dictated restructuring have long been familiar to those who study late Soviet and post-Soviet Eurasian world. From stagnation of late Brezhnev era, to failed restructuring of perestroika, crises of 1989-91, and upheaval wrought by Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, economic crisis has been a recurring and well-documented phenomenon in former Soviet territories. That economic crisis has also been a persistent feature of what used to be called First World during same period is no less significant a phenomenon for historians of Soviet Union. (1) Indeed, synchronicity of crises in Western and Soviet spheres--most noticeably, during transsystemic stagflation crisis of 1970s that ushered in both Reaganism and Gorbachevism--suggests persistent interconnections that bind together economic systems even in context of heated geopolitical opposition. The articles collected in this forum aim to reconsider role played by economy in Soviet interwar period. They examine relationship between economic crisis and establishment of system of Stalinism. Aware of limitations of economic history produced during ascendant period of Soviet history--most notably, constricted and frequently deterministic appropriation of economy in traditional Marxist historiography--we do not intend simply to return to earlier traditions. Rather, we seek to engage with what William H. Sewell has recently called the historical study of economic by considering anew relationship between economic change and contemporaneous transformations in society, culture, law, and politics. (2) We re-embrace study of economic life in Soviet context, arguing that turn to Stalinism at end of 1920s was structured fundamentally by onset of global crisis in capitalist economic system, of which Soviet Union remained a firmly ensconced, if thoroughly ambivalent part. (3) Aside from early political struggles over party leadership, few subjects attracted as much sustained historical attention during formative period of Soviet historiography in West as nature and function of Soviet economy. The period spanning late 1920s through mid-1970s witnessed publication of foundational monographs on Soviet economy and economic policy by Maurice Dobb, Colin Clark, Solomon Schwarz, Abram Bergson, Naum Jasny, Alexander Erlich, Alec Nove, and R. W. Davies, to name but a few. (4) E. H. Carr's field-defining opus, while not explicitly a work of economic history, nevertheless placed economy at center of a total history of USSR. (5) Regardless of ideological and political divisions, pioneering generations of Sovietologists more or less accepted ascendancy of economy as a structuring reality of Soviet historical development. It would be difficult to overstate contribution of these founding generations of economists; indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that they by and large established field of Soviet history. Their framing concerns included role played by party in construction of economic policy, intraparty disputes over trajectory of economic policy, origins and consequences of collectivization and establishment of mass institutions of production and consumption, and discussion over inevitability of development of Stalinist planned economy. …

Economic crisis, accountability, and the state’s coercive assault on public education in the USA

This article examines education accountability as a mechanism of coercive neoliberal urban governance in the USA. Drawing on Gramscian theory of the ‘integral state’ as the dialectical synthesis of coercion, consent, and resistance, the author argues that as the crisis gives the state less room to win consent, it intensifies coercion as a strategy of governance. The author discusses three aspects of coercive state responses to the crisis in relation to education: (1) cannibalizing public education as a site of capital accumulation; (2) imposition of state austerity regimes and selective abandonment of education as a mechanism of social reproduction and legitimation in African-American communities that have become zones of disposability; and (3) governance by exclusion of African-American and Latino communities through school closings, state takeovers of elected governance bodies, and disenfranchisement. Systems of accountability are integral to this process as they make schools legible for the market, mark specific schools and school districts as pathological and in need of authoritarian governance, and justify minimalist schools in areas of urban disposability. This paper concludes with the potential of emergent resistance to dominant neoliberal education policy and argues that breaking with the framework of accountability and testing is critical to a counter-hegemonic alternative.

New labour in libraries: the post‐Fordist public library

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of French School Regulation theory for questions of relevance to researchers and practitioners working in the field of information policy in general and public librarianship in particular.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is divided into two parts. Part one outlines Regulation theory's twin analytic tools of Fordism and post‐Fordism and its value for questions about the evolution of the public library. Part two provides an example of the approach's explanatory potential when applied to a series of public library planning documents produced by the Government of Ontario, Canada from the 1950s.FindingsAn interpretation of the evolution of the identity of the library user from patron to customer to information producer‐consumer is proposed at the intersection of the neoliberal state's austerity in social spending, the ubiquity of the new information and communication technologies, and fundamental changes in libraries as sites of waged‐work.Research limitations/implicationsThe research facilitates the development of a political economy of the contemporary public library of potential value to the international public library community. Also, conceiving of the public library as first and foremost a site of productive work forces one to re‐engage with the meaning of shifting relations between the library user and the institution on working conditions.Originality/valueThe applicability of a relatively under‐utilized theoretical framework is modelled that enables one to ask new questions of relevance to the field of library and information science.

State Austerity and the Racial Politics of Same-Sex Marriage in the US

This article situates contemporary debates about same-sex marriage in relation to the politics of state austerity, particularly 'welfare reform', in the US. While these two issues are rarely thought about together, looking at claims for marriage rights in the context of cutbacks in social welfare programs and the increasing promotion of 'marriage incentives' as a means of getting low-income single mothers off welfare reveals conservative undertones to same-sex marriage campaigns. This article examines the specific benefits that gay and lesbian activists seek to access through marriage, arguing that these benefits are better understood as privileges of a racially stratified welfare state.

Die italienischen Gewerkschaften - eine Bestandsaufnahme von den 70er Jahren bis heute

After the deconstruction of the Italian trade unions which took place in the eighties due to a political anti-trade-unions offensive by the state and enterprises, a careful renaissance of trade union politics has started since the early nineties. This revival is owing to the new production models, on the one hand, which are rediscovering the role of human labour and are therefore opting for a stronger cooperation; on the other hand it is an expression of the opposition against a repetition of the state's austerity policy which fosters the unity of the trade unions.