For a Resilient City – Insights from a Civic Conversation in Glasgow

networks, 2008

The current economic situation in Glasgow is one with substantial growth in service sector employment and vacancies at a high. However, a significant number of the population remains marginalized from the labour market. Existing policies to tackle this marginalisation have attempted to remedy problems at the levels of individual skills and capacities (labour supply side) and stimulation of jobs growth (labour demand side). Successful though these approaches have been, there still remains a persistent core of the working age population who seem no nearer to finding sustained employment in the city economy. Preliminary research by the Full Employment Areas initiative (FEA) suggested that client’s social networks could be an additional factor contributing to labour market proximity and likelihood of attaining sustained employment, particularly when the networks are confined to small geographical areas characterised by high levels of worklessness. This research explored these networks through qualitative methods and aimed to build upon and contribute new knowledge of processes underpinning client’s participation in employment. The overall aim was to offer employability agencies better understanding of how to support and advise clients in a holistic manner

2008

2019

Dear friends and colleagues, We are pleased to share with you our lastest publication: Intrepid Knowledge: Interdisciplinary & Transdisciplinary Research and Collaboration - http://intrepid-cost.ics.ulisboa.pt/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/INTREPID_ebook.pdf A book that tells the story of INTREPID, and of the journey upon which we all embarked upon. In it, you will find a compendium of highlights from selected works carried out by our three working groups during the 4-year Intrepid journey, as well as reflections on the experience from the perspective of the participants, and finally - some ideas for an 'Intrepid future'. This is also -perhaps mainly- our way to say 'thank you' to the INTREPID community, its Management Committee members and Working Group teams, Training School participants, as well as invited speakers and international advisors, who have supported and inspired us over the years. Thank you all! Olivia, Marta & Marite

Citizenship Studies, 2013

This article examines the shift in discourses of citizenship from Britain from notions of entitlement and obligation to those of self-government, and the reciprocity between the responsibilisation of individual and collective citizen-subjectivities. Against the backdrop of debates about society as the telos of government, this article will interrogate the claim that New Conservatism's 'Big Society' represents a unique rationality of government and an alternative formula of advanced liberal rule. By doing so, the article will extend our understanding of 'post-welfare regimes of the social' and illustrate precisely how they operate in contemporary Britain.

If ever it left us, sovereignty has returned. The protectionist and nativist instincts that helped propel Donald Trump into office have been felt throughout the Western world as new nationalisms have forced themselves into the political mainstream. The promise of post-national identities, global flows of people and capital, and the weakening of the 'bright lines' of state control have been met by a forceful resistance that foregrounds local interests and concerns, often depends on ethnically defined notions of identity and clings fervently to nationalistic histories and modes of belonging. Whilst we might dismiss some of these movements as being motivated by atavistic fears of difference, there is a powerful sense that the events of 2016 represent the high watermark for the form of turbo-charged globalisation let loose as the Berlin Wall fell and the 'new world order' took hold in the early 1990s. As Kyle McGee argues, the West is suffering from a loss of both 'place' and 'land' as the dual forces of globalisation and global warming put extant forms of attachment to locale and community under erasure (McGee 2017). In such conditions, the allure of sovereignty with its promise to 'take back control', as the Brexit campaign had it, is quite understandable. If 'waning sovereignty' (Brown 2014) has accompanied these 'twin vertigos of placelessness and landlessness' (McGee 2017), its recent revival offers – some would believe – a line of defence against the forces of globalisation and increasing precarity. Against this background we engage with the theme of obligation in two ways. Firstly, we explore the ways in the which juridically enforceable obligations installed and defended by modern constitutional sovereignty are crucial to giving shape to the affective life of a community. We approach sovereignty through the sentiments that it produces – or claims to produce – and the particular effect that it has in enframing the world and giving scope to a sense of our political attachments and modes of belonging. We dwell on the sensibilities associated with sovereignty and on how the mobilisation of the rights and duties associated with the protection of sovereignty affectively enframes the way a political community attaches to place, past and an imagined future. Published text available in Law, Obligation, Community (Routledge, 2018).

The Humanistic Psychologist, 2002

2019

Serbia is said to have one of the highest rates of brain drain in the world. For the generation glossed as the “children of the 1990s,” stances toward mobility and migration have shifted along with geopolitics. Following nearly two decades of wartime entrapment, in 2009 the conditions of possibility for mobility fundamentally changed for Serbian citizens. Of both symbolic and material consequence, the country’s return to respectable geopolitical standing also marked a shift toward more nuanced stancetaking in relation to mobility and migration. Namely, by the time of my research, the expectations of youth—not only of “normal mobility” but of “normalcy” more generally—had become more and more often calibrated against personal experiences of real-life travel. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Belgrade, Serbia from October 2014–December 2015, this dissertation tracks some of the consequences of this shift for young potential migrants in Serbia. I explore how the problem of skilled migration is constituted, the discourses produced, and the practices prompted. I analyze the mobility narratives of young potential migrants as proxies for commentary on a host of other socioeconomic issues. My focus is on the real and symbolic geographies invoked in talk of leaving and staying in Serbia; on how young potential migrants narrate their everyday navigations in the “here and now” and give moral weight to migratory aspirations for, and experiences of, lives lived in the “then and there.” I argue that the foundational motif of these varied imaginaries is a deep investment in meritocracy, a value-laden register called upon to articulate aspiration as well as critique. Engaging the politics of mobility holistically, I also excavate what it means to stay in a context so many others leave. I explore the growth of social entrepreneurship and the digital economy as recent efforts to coax dignified work from an inhospitable climate of precarity (and as key to governmental “solutions” to brain drain). I untangle how entrepreneurialism is promoted as a project of reforming values while also serving as a realm of authenticity and “apolitical activism” for some. Training attention on work in the digital economy I illuminate how economic subjectivities are cultivated in complex relation to place and belonging in ways that muddy the dichotomy between staying and leaving. Finally, I show how both promoters of entrepreneurship and Serbia’s digital transformation harness the dominant discourse on brain drain to cast themselves as certain social types and legitimize their agendas. This dissertation demonstrates how contemporary stances toward mobility and migration articulate aspirations to dignify the conditions of life and work, are implicated in a reconfiguration of middle-classness, and reveal how postsocialist subjects understand themselves and construct life projects in the context of ongoing political and socioeconomic change.