The launch of the private sponsorship scheme, Community Sponsorship (CS), allowing individuals to resettle refugees in the UK, seems to be in contrast with the government’s approach towards immigration aimed to implement the hostile environment policy. Using frame analysis, this research looks at the diagnostic, prognostic and motivational framings used by policymakers in parliamentary debates related

The mental health and well-being of university staff and students in the UK are reported to have seriously deteriorated. Rather than taking this ‘mental health crisis’ at face value, we carry out network and discourse analyses to investigate the policy assemblages (comprising social actors, institutions, technologies, knowledges and discourses) through which the ‘crisis' is addressed. Our analysis

Before Covid-19 around a quarter of the UK’s rough sleeping population were non-UK nationals, with the proportion rising above half in some metropolitan areas. The UK government’s targeting of rough-sleeping EU citizens for ‘administrative removal’ between 2010–2017 reflected a trend in social policy towards enforcement- rather than support-based ‘solutions’ to migrant homelessness. Changes to the

Family policies promoting gender equality and parents’ shared responsibility for their children tend to assume good parental collaboration post separation. However, this assumption obscures the reality of conflict and intimate partner violence (IPV) in some separated families. Focusing on Sweden, this article examines the 2016 reform which implies that the state ceases acting as an intermediary to

This article discusses public social welfare provision to homeless EU migrants in Norway. Most of these migrants have no or weak affiliations with the formal labour market, resulting in restricted rights to public social assistance. Drawing on the concept of precarious inclusion, I suggest that rather than being simply excluded from public social welfare, homeless EU migrants are included in the welfare

Public demands for greater police accountability, particularly in relation to violence targeting Black and Brown communities, have placed pressure on law enforcement organisations to be more transparent about officers’ actions. The implementation of police body-worn cameras (BWCs) has become a popular response. This article examines the embrace of BWCs amidst the wider shift toward evidence-based policing

This article applies the work of Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells to contemporary children and families’ social work in England. Castells’ work suggests that the intractability of many of the issues facing the profession is the result of the new type of society that emerged around the turn of the millennium: the network society. Within this society, the interests and values of dominant networks

In 2019, South Africa implemented a national minimum wage (NMW) for the first time. This is an important intervention, given that the South African labour market continues to generate some of the highest levels of income and wealth inequality in the world. The minimum wage is intended as a structural intervention to transform the labour market by setting a wage floor, while highlighting larger issues

The article draws on Bacchi’s ideas about problematisation (2020) and links to technological solutionism as governing logics of our age, to explore the double-faceted problem-solving logic operating in the UK family policy and early intervention field. Families with certain characteristics are identified as problematic, and local authorities are tasked with intervening to fix that social problem. Local

Despite significant efforts to end it, violence, abuse and neglect continue to contribute to preventable harms and deaths among people using disability services. To explore why these harms persist and what is needed to prevent them, we examine the safety-related attitudes and practices among frontline staff delivering services in the context of an individualized funding scheme, Australia’s National

This article provides a corrective to the dominant celebratory narrative about the conditional cash transfer programme in the Philippines, the Pantawid, and its associated social registry, the Listahanan. Based on extensive documentary analysis and fieldwork in the Philippines in 2017 and 2018, we argue that the targeting system has in fact been unable to function according to its primary purpose of

The article contributes to understanding the political economy of implementation of social protection programmes at local level. Current debates are dominated by technocratic arguments, emphasizing the lack of financial resources, technology or skills as major barriers for effective implementation. Describing how chiefs, assistant-chiefs and community elders are routinely at the centre stage of core

Drawing on feminist care ethics and political theory (Engster and Hamington, 2015; Held, 2006; Noddings, 2015; Tronto, 2013), this paper examines how educators working in private (Ontario) and public (Denmark) childcare systems think about and practice care. Through interviews with pedagogues (Denmark) and early childhood educators (Ontario), linkages between the public/private positioning of care

People in carceral institutions are at increased risk for COVID-19 infection. Applying critical race theory to the problem of COVID-19 provides tools to analyze the risk of infection and evaluate the public health response within the imprisoned, jailed, and detained population. On the surface, this is due to factors related to a lack of hygiene products, an inability to physically distance, a low quality

While the focus on emotions has been associated with the rise of psychosocial welfare and has promised a gateway to accommodate individually diversified needs of citizens in policies, the article shows that the role of emotions needs to be better understood. Highlighting emotions can serve both to empower and to patronize those who experience them. Referring to emotions can thus strengthen hierarchies

Social care provision across high-income countries has been transformed over the last ten years by personalisation – a policy agenda to give people with eligible support needs more choice and control over their support. Yet the ideological underpinnings of this transformation remain highly mutable, particularly in the context of reduced welfare provision that has unfolded in many nations advancing

This article discusses the findings of a small-scale study investigating the impact of food poverty on youth work in community based open access settings. It documents the growing impact of food poverty on the role of youth work in deprived communities and explores the role youth workers play in addressing it. Firstly this ‘community response’ addresses the issue of food poverty in localities where

Between 2010–2015, the Coalition’s pursuit of a radical austerity programme saw Britain’s Jobcentre Plus experience some of the most punitive reforms and budget cuts in its history. Focusing on the outcomes of these reforms, a growing body of research has found that claiming processes became a more ‘institutionally violent’ and injurious experience for out-of-work benefit claimants. The present article

This article draws on interviews with 41 Australian separated mothers, and the government forms, information and instructions used to administer their child support and benefit entitlements, to reveal four tactics through which women’s decision-making was coordinated to produce financial benefits to the state. The state pursued its preferred outcome by foregrounding women’s obligation to seek and collect

The Prevent Strategy tasks the British education sector with preventing radicalisation and extremism. It defines extremism as opposition to fundamental British Values and requires schools to promote these values and refer students and staff believed to be vulnerable to radicalisation. Little research examining the enactment of the Prevent and British Values curriculum has included students. To fill

Using a Foucauldian perspective, we explicate the systems of power which shape the lives of women in or at risk of ‘food poverty’. We develop a theoretical framework of power for analyses of contemporary food poverty, which we apply to data from focus groups with women on low incomes in two cities in the north of England. Our data underlines the repressive power of the state as well as the broader

This commentary discusses the implications of the changes made to the social security system by the UK government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government did not veer from its programme of welfare reform. However, emergency legislation made significant concessions including: an increase in the value of the UK’s main means-tested benefit Universal Credit

Nadie es Perfecto (Nobody’s Perfect, or NEP) is a parenting skills workshop aimed at ‘sharing experiences and receiving guidance on everyday problems to strengthen child development’. This article explores this workshop in terms of its relationship with the daily lives of participants, based on one year of fieldwork focused on families with young children in a low-income neighbourhood in Santiago.

In 2012, Home Secretary Theresa May told a newspaper that she wanted to create a ‘really hostile environment’ for irregular migrants in the UK. Although the phrase has since mutated to refer to generalised state-led marginalisation of immigrants, this article argues that the hostile environment is a specific policy approach, and one with profound significance for the UK’s border practices. We trace

In recent years, a discourse of ‘ethical artificial intelligence’ has emerged and gained international traction in response to widely publicised AI failures. In Australia, the discourse around ethical AI does not accord with the reality of AI deployment in the public sector. Drawing on institutional ethnographic approaches, this paper describes the misalignments between how technology is described

Despite the fact that the unemployment rate in the Czech Republic is one of the lowest in Europe, the country suffers from stagnating long-term unemployment. At the same time, there is a large number of people who fall out of the system as a result of harsh sanctions. The article aims to examine how the activation policy is implemented from the perspective of job seekers and to identify street-level

In 2012, the ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) condition was extended to long-standing migrant families in the UK who had previously achieved rights to residence and welfare through human rights mechanisms. Through close examination of policy, political statements, and media coverage, we make the case that the NRPF extension was – and continues to be – intentionally subjugating and punitive, most

This article critically examines the Danish ‘ghetto initiatives’ of 2004, 2010, 2013 and 2018, with a particular focus on their implications for ‘social citizenship’. Its approach is twofold: first...

This article discusses the growing presence of police officers in British schools, under a resurgent police–school partnerships policy agenda in the ‘war on gangs’ and serious youth violence. It ar...

There is significant research evidence which demonstrates that LGBTQI+ young people experience higher rates of homelessness than their straight and cis peers. However, estimates of the scale of the...

Failure to take climate change seriously enough has resulted in the world now facing a climate emergency, with rising global temperatures, melting polar ice caps, increasingly frequent and severe storms, floods and droughts, and rising sea levels. Despite being the first country in the world to set statutory carbon emissions reduction targets (in the Climate Change Act 2008), the UK government since

The involvement of prisoners on license in the recent London Bridge and Streatham, London attacks have triggered a series of policies aiming to restrict community release. These aim to address not ...

NHS charging for ‘overseas visitors’ is recognised as deterring migrants from accessing necessary health care. Even though maternity care does not have to be paid in advance, fear of four-figure bi...

Reform of the family leave system has been on the Finnish political agenda for a long time but has proved to be a challenging task. The challenges relate to ideological differences between the poli...

In recent years British welfare policy and immigration policy have intertwined in new ways, with widespread cuts alongside increasing conditionality, rationing, and differentiation of rights. This ...

Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash transfer programme has been widely characterised as ‘home grown’. This article challenges such accounts of the LEAP by showing how donors ...

Utilizing Foucault’s insights on neoliberalism, his notion of governmentality in relation to the State, and his insights on the processes of subjectivity (2007; 2006) the following article seeks to...

The UK funeral industry is a frequently overlooked sector within critical policy discussions of State practice and welfare provision. In this article, we propose three ‘ideal types’ for making sens...

agency, and thus possibilities to reconfigure their dynamic expression and operation (McIntosh and Wright, 2019: 455–456). Equally, the apparently idiosyncratic experiences and behaviours of welfare service users are – through this edited collection – shown to be part of a ‘shared typical’ when it comes to those at ‘the sharp end’ of behavioural requirements and how these are formed through policy

Bilson A and Martin KE (2016) ‘Referrals and Child Protection in England: One in Five Children Referred to Children’s Services and One in Nineteen Investigated before the Age of Five’, British Journal of Social Work 47(3): 793–811. Cooper V and Whyte D (2017) The Violence of Austerity. London: Pluto. Disabled People Against the Cuts (DPAC) (n.d.). Available at: https://dpac.uk.net/ research/ MacAlister

Presented here are the findings of a research study undertaken between 2015 and 2018 that focused on existing arrangements and mechanisms for front-line identification of the victims of forced labo...

Households have a role to play in the so-called ‘energy turn’ in Switzerland, a policy framework that calls for more efficient energy usage. Against this backdrop, this article critically analyses ...

census and other linked research databases to profile clients of unemployment programs. I particularly appreciate Grundy’s work to map the overlapping vocabularies and logics of each cycle of reform because this mapping helpfully illustrates ways in which the affirmative talk of expert problem solvers can be so difficult to negotiate in practice. In fact, I was struck when reading Grundy’s work by

This is a book review of Kelly Bogue's The divisive state of social policy. Divided into seven chapters and an appendix with participant information and demographics, the book weaves together several theoretical and empirical strands. Chapters 1 and 2 set the stage for the subsequent empirical chapters, describing the genesis of the Bedroom Tax and outlining the history of social housing in the UK

In the 40th anniversary of Critical Social Policy (CSP), this activist edition on ‘Living Activist Struggles to End Social Injustice’ foregrounds the relationship between activism and social policy. The contributions in this edition, bringing grass-root voices from the margins to the centre (hooks, 1984), expose an uneasy, disturbing and, at times, alarming relationship with social policy and welfare

not possibly have the transformative effects that Haagh claims are achievable. Even an insufficient UBI that paid token sums to everyone would absorb funds that are sorely needed for other potentially transformative measures such as developing more and better collective services and a Green New Deal. No practical trials have provided any evidence that UBI as envisaged by Haagh could have the results

and class, and the temporally cyclical nature of ‘the housing question’. She aptly constructs the book so that the reader is guided to understand that the Bedroom Tax is a process not a single government action that arrived unanticipated with the Welfare Reform Act of 2012. Bogue’s deliberate, dignified yet impassioned writing highlights how the Bedroom Tax is simply the most recent manifestation in

Using policy frameworks and author expertise to identify relevant literature, four academics and two student-activist-authors, critically review literature upon student activist responses to sexual...

In the UK, individuals with limited English-language proficiency (LEP) self-report poorer health and face challenges accessing health and social care support. Health and social care policies in Eng...

Abolishing ‘modern slavery’ has now achieved international policy consensus. The most recent UK initiative – the 2015 Modern Slavery Act (MSA) – includes amongst other aspects tougher prison senten...

The Turkish Government is under pressure to accommodate the Syrian population in its territories. Several strategies including devolution, co-production of public services and finally institutional...

The UK Immigration Act 2016 is central to the Conservative Government’s drive to create a more hostile environment for potential migrants and current ‘illegal’ migrants residing in the UK. The Righ...

In 1977, Jones (in Bryson and Mowbray, 1981: 255) described the term ‘community’ as ‘the aerosol word of the 1970s because of the hopeful way it is sprayed over deteriorating institutions.’ They ar...

This article engages with the shift towards an emphasis on ‘resilience’ in local government discourses. Using the London Borough of Newham as a case study, it will argue that contradictory definiti...

Vulnerability has been a guiding narrative to state interventions towards children and their families in New Zealand. This article shows how this progressive notion has been systematically managed to fit pre-established political and policy priorities. These processes have emphasised: (i) categorisations of risk to those who demonstrate vulnerabilities; (ii) pre-emptive, multi-agency involvement in

This article provides a critical reflection on Birmingham Black Sisters’ (BBS) experiences of fighting racism and sexism during the 1980s, having lain dormant for three decades and now attempting to regalvanise, the article explores some of the key tensions they faced and reflects on the possibilities for future activism. The article is based on both individual contributions from BBS members, who loosely

Research has shown that mental healthcare policies aimed at achieving autonomy and integration for people with mental disorders have been developing all over the world. Critics working from a gover...

This article critically engages with the voices of South Asian, Muslim women living in Rotherham to provide an emic gaze (Pike, 1967) of the intersectional lived experience of the ‘cultural others’. Everyday voices of South Asian, Muslim women activists living in the UK are marginalised based on prejudicial cultural assumptions. We demonstrate our challenge of negative discourses of the ‘passive and

Despite widespread recognition that housing is a serious social concern, policy responses have tended to be inadequate. After a brief review of the magnitude of the problem, this paper focuses on recent experience in the UK where, during a period of political volatility, housing has been the subject of significant government interventions, which in turn have provoked noteworthy reactions. However,

Beatriz Espejo has worked in Barcelona as a trans-sex-worker since the 1980s, and in 1993 she founded the CTC, one of the leading activist organisations in the Spanish trans movement during the ’00s. The CTC had a direct impact on the definition of the Spanish law on gender identity. Although it may seem like a success story, this activist articulation has been conflicted and complicated: alliances