This article examines the changing experience of love at a time of deepening inequalities. Drawin... more This article examines the changing experience of love at a time of deepening inequalities. Drawing on the ‘love story’ of one resident of London’s Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea – arguably the UK’s most unequal space – it builds a relational account of love to describe the forms of attachment and detachment that accompany everyday life in an increasingly divided place. This approach signals three wider contributions. First, by tracing love through life course and life world, this article conceptualises the sustained and far-reaching way inequalities are lived and felt in everyday life. Second, the foregrounding of love stories as methodology highlights the roles of agency and narrative in how we tell and write about inequalities. In drawing these points together, this article thirdly conceptualises inequality as processual, situated and contested – as an emergent process of ‘becoming unequal’ through which we can trace shifting relations between space, time and power.
Food banks are a growing feature of austerity Britain. Despite this, little research has focused ... more Food banks are a growing feature of austerity Britain. Despite this, little research has focused on the object central to their operations: the food they provision. In charting an attempt to “open” food bank parcels to greater scrutiny, this article highlights the need to take back taste from predominantly nutritionist framings of food. Drawing on recent work in more-than-representational and visceral geography, it is argued that taste must be understood as an embodied, sensorial and social phenomenon. However, this article highlights the ethico-political dilemmas that accompany such an undertaking, and the wider implications raised by studying the tastes of socially and economically marginalised groups. These tensions are explored through recourse to the political, ethical and epistemological stakes of auto-corporeal methods – in this case, employing my own tasting body in consuming a “food bank diet.” In arguing that such an approach is necessarily wedded to forms of failure and p...
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2020
This paper is about shame, its geographies and its role in the government of conduct in austerity... more This paper is about shame, its geographies and its role in the government of conduct in austerity Britain. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data from a Trussell Trust foodbank in the Valleys of South Wales, the geography of shame is investigated through its spatiality, temporality and politics. Together, these avenues demonstrate how shame not only acts over those individual bodies experiencing food poverty but also realises an operation of power for pushing austere conducts onto collective populations. Reading shame in this fashion necessitates two critical interventions. Firstly, this article builds a geographical account of shame that provides an alternative route through psychological and sociological understandings-culminating in a re-definition of shame as the feeling that emerges from a contested uncovering of out-of-placeness. Secondly, this article adds a geographical contribution to emergent theorisation of 'affective governmentality.' By positioning 'shameful subsistence' as a specific affective governmentality at a time of austerity, this paper departs from previous studies of governmentality that tend to emphasise the numerical and statistical as the primary 'technical factors' used to govern life. This paper demonstrates how shame is not limited to the spaces and users of foodbanks: rather, shame is a central framework for understanding the contemporary politics of austerity both in the places it creates and through the feelings, behaviours and values it encourages.
This paper contributes to emerging geographical literature on what is here conceptualised as 'act... more This paper contributes to emerging geographical literature on what is here conceptualised as 'actually existing austerity'-referring to the uneven ways through which austerity is felt, negotiated, embodied and contested in the varied spatial tapestry of everyday life. Through theorisation of the contemporary operation of food banking in the UK, it will be argued that the gaps in provisioning (in this case, of food) left by welfare reform and state spending cuts in the UK under the guise of austerity are engendering new forms of responsibility that are unevenly distributed and performed-often by those already excluded, marginalised and impoverished. This localisation of responsibility has crucial implications for how austerity becomes embodied and negotiated, as well as the unequal material implications it holds for different people and places. This paper concludes by arguing for a future research agenda concerning actually existing austerity, signalling the need for 'thicker' and more grounded accounts of austerity at scales beyond the nation-state and/or city alone.
This paper develops a Foucauldian reading of the phenomenon of UK foodbanking. Rather than provid... more This paper develops a Foucauldian reading of the phenomenon of UK foodbanking. Rather than providing straightforward subsistence, Trussell Trust foodbanks exercise a vital politics that acts over hungry bodies at a time of austerity. Through conceptualisation of the vital technologies of biopower, this article draws attention to the three underpinning logics of this system: interpretation, provisioning and improvement. These techniques reveal a power over life that not only seeks to provide subsistence, but to transform hunger into a technical object through which needy bodies can be improved out of existence. However, this paper also highlights the limits of this biopolitical and disciplinary system by drawing attention to its scalar politics, specifically emphasising the everyday power of living that undermine techniques over the vital life of bodies and populations. In so doing, this paper calls for more sustained attention to how the politics of life is lived and lively, situated and multi-scalar, through conceptualisation of its vital geographies.
A review piece looking into the impact of the recent television series 'Benefits Street' and seve... more A review piece looking into the impact of the recent television series 'Benefits Street' and several other key texts in geography on the linkage between ontologies of an underclass and the operation of the neoliberal state. In particular, this artlcle critiques constructions of poor people as depoliticised, abject objects upon which the successful operation of power is pre-supposed, instead urging the need for accounts of power which re-centre on the political subject.
This article examines the changing experience of love at a time of deepening inequalities. Drawin... more This article examines the changing experience of love at a time of deepening inequalities. Drawing on the ‘love story’ of one resident of London’s Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea – arguably the UK’s most unequal space – it builds a relational account of love to describe the forms of attachment and detachment that accompany everyday life in an increasingly divided place. This approach signals three wider contributions. First, by tracing love through life course and life world, this article conceptualises the sustained and far-reaching way inequalities are lived and felt in everyday life. Second, the foregrounding of love stories as methodology highlights the roles of agency and narrative in how we tell and write about inequalities. In drawing these points together, this article thirdly conceptualises inequality as processual, situated and contested – as an emergent process of ‘becoming unequal’ through which we can trace shifting relations between space, time and power.
Food banks are a growing feature of austerity Britain. Despite this, little research has focused ... more Food banks are a growing feature of austerity Britain. Despite this, little research has focused on the object central to their operations: the food they provision. In charting an attempt to “open” food bank parcels to greater scrutiny, this article highlights the need to take back taste from predominantly nutritionist framings of food. Drawing on recent work in more-than-representational and visceral geography, it is argued that taste must be understood as an embodied, sensorial and social phenomenon. However, this article highlights the ethico-political dilemmas that accompany such an undertaking, and the wider implications raised by studying the tastes of socially and economically marginalised groups. These tensions are explored through recourse to the political, ethical and epistemological stakes of auto-corporeal methods – in this case, employing my own tasting body in consuming a “food bank diet.” In arguing that such an approach is necessarily wedded to forms of failure and p...
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2020
This paper is about shame, its geographies and its role in the government of conduct in austerity... more This paper is about shame, its geographies and its role in the government of conduct in austerity Britain. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data from a Trussell Trust foodbank in the Valleys of South Wales, the geography of shame is investigated through its spatiality, temporality and politics. Together, these avenues demonstrate how shame not only acts over those individual bodies experiencing food poverty but also realises an operation of power for pushing austere conducts onto collective populations. Reading shame in this fashion necessitates two critical interventions. Firstly, this article builds a geographical account of shame that provides an alternative route through psychological and sociological understandings-culminating in a re-definition of shame as the feeling that emerges from a contested uncovering of out-of-placeness. Secondly, this article adds a geographical contribution to emergent theorisation of 'affective governmentality.' By positioning 'shameful subsistence' as a specific affective governmentality at a time of austerity, this paper departs from previous studies of governmentality that tend to emphasise the numerical and statistical as the primary 'technical factors' used to govern life. This paper demonstrates how shame is not limited to the spaces and users of foodbanks: rather, shame is a central framework for understanding the contemporary politics of austerity both in the places it creates and through the feelings, behaviours and values it encourages.
This paper contributes to emerging geographical literature on what is here conceptualised as 'act... more This paper contributes to emerging geographical literature on what is here conceptualised as 'actually existing austerity'-referring to the uneven ways through which austerity is felt, negotiated, embodied and contested in the varied spatial tapestry of everyday life. Through theorisation of the contemporary operation of food banking in the UK, it will be argued that the gaps in provisioning (in this case, of food) left by welfare reform and state spending cuts in the UK under the guise of austerity are engendering new forms of responsibility that are unevenly distributed and performed-often by those already excluded, marginalised and impoverished. This localisation of responsibility has crucial implications for how austerity becomes embodied and negotiated, as well as the unequal material implications it holds for different people and places. This paper concludes by arguing for a future research agenda concerning actually existing austerity, signalling the need for 'thicker' and more grounded accounts of austerity at scales beyond the nation-state and/or city alone.
This paper develops a Foucauldian reading of the phenomenon of UK foodbanking. Rather than provid... more This paper develops a Foucauldian reading of the phenomenon of UK foodbanking. Rather than providing straightforward subsistence, Trussell Trust foodbanks exercise a vital politics that acts over hungry bodies at a time of austerity. Through conceptualisation of the vital technologies of biopower, this article draws attention to the three underpinning logics of this system: interpretation, provisioning and improvement. These techniques reveal a power over life that not only seeks to provide subsistence, but to transform hunger into a technical object through which needy bodies can be improved out of existence. However, this paper also highlights the limits of this biopolitical and disciplinary system by drawing attention to its scalar politics, specifically emphasising the everyday power of living that undermine techniques over the vital life of bodies and populations. In so doing, this paper calls for more sustained attention to how the politics of life is lived and lively, situated and multi-scalar, through conceptualisation of its vital geographies.
A review piece looking into the impact of the recent television series 'Benefits Street' and seve... more A review piece looking into the impact of the recent television series 'Benefits Street' and several other key texts in geography on the linkage between ontologies of an underclass and the operation of the neoliberal state. In particular, this artlcle critiques constructions of poor people as depoliticised, abject objects upon which the successful operation of power is pre-supposed, instead urging the need for accounts of power which re-centre on the political subject.
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