ASA Anthropology of Britain network hybrid book launch

Join us for a celebration of three new books by ASA Anthropology of Britain network members, which explore experiences of political economic change in Britain since the 2008 financial crisis. In this hybrid, round table discussion, panellists will engage with themes ranging from identity to community, inequality and research methodology. For those joining in person, there will be tea and coffee after the event.

Location

In person: Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Lecture Theatre 1

Online: Zoomlink to follow

Timing

Panel discussion 14.00-15.30 UK time.

In person teas and coffees 15.30-16.00.

Panel

Dr Jessica Fagin – Chair

Dr Ryan Davey – Author The Personal Life of Debt

Dr Celia Plender – Author The Everyday Politics of Food Co-ops

Professor Katharine Tyler – Editor Reflections on Polarisation and Inequalities in Brexit Pandemic Times

Book details

The Personal Life of Debt: Coercion, Subjectivity and Inequality in Britain

Ryan Davey

Bristol University Press As the cost of living rises, British households face unprecedented levels of debt. But many commentators characterise those who stash away envelopes, leave telephones ringing, or hide from debt collectors as irresponsible.

The first full-length ethnography of debt problems in Britain, this book uses long-term fieldwork on a southern English housing estate to give a sensitive retelling of the everyday lives of indebted people.

It argues that the inequalities of debt go beyond economic questions to include the way state coercion hinders people’s efforts to define what they truly value. Indeed, from finance to housing and even parenthood, the potential for dispossession has become a pervasive method of power that strikes at the heart of personal life.

The Everyday Politics of Food Co-ops: Care, Aid and Community in Austerity Britain

Celia Plender

Berghahn Books

National politics has a significant impact on organizing and accessing community welfare. This book engages with notions of everyday politics within two London-based food co-ops emerging from different political environments and ideologies. It provides a careful and engaging examination of the experiences of political and economic change in Austerity Britain, revealing how national politics came to punctuate everyday lives within the co-ops. It highlights the political resonances that practices of care, aid and community organizing came to have within the food co-ops at a time of rapid welfare withdrawal, as well as the tensions between more radical and neoliberal imaginaries that played out within them.

Reflections on Polarisation and Inequalities in Brexit Pandemic Times: Fractured Lives in Britain

Katharine Tyler, Susan Banducci, Cathrine Degnen (Eds.)

Routledge

This is the first interdisciplinary edited collection that examines the manifestation of social inequalities and polarisations in Britain throughout the dual crises of the Brexit vote and the Covid-19 pandemic. The volume demonstrates that Brexit and the pandemic are not self-contained events but rather are major ongoing processes that have impacted all aspects of British social and political life. Drawing on an array of empirical case studies conducted in the wake of the Brexit vote and during pandemic lockdowns, chapters trace how these processes illuminate, consolidate, and amplify existing and entrenched social inequalities and polarisations that shape the fabric of British society, including racial, ethnic, class, migrant, national, and gendered inequalities.

Main image credit: Over the Threshold by Helen Snell from Reflections on Polarisation and Inequalities in Brexit Pandemic Times: Fractured Lives in Britain