This chapter engages with austerity and inequality as forms of slow structural violence, which unfold through the relationship between governors and the governed on the terrain of the local state and urban social infrastructures. Drawing on research conducted in London between 2015 and 2017, the author discusses the active role of the local state in rolling out austerity urbanism in London and suggests that a depoliticising ‘common sense’ over how austerity should be – and is being – administered is legible based on three inter-locking logics: compassionate competence; demand management; and speculative urban entrepreneurialism. The author also pays close attention to growing tensions between those who seek to ‘responsibly’ govern and build consensus for the slow structural violence of budget cuts and those who ‘dissensually’ refuse to be governed in such a way, who refuse to participate in the spoiling of social infrastructure or the social cleansing of their neighbourhoods. The chapter concludes by suggesting that an important current in London’s emergent urban social movements is that they are pushing beyond calls for a simple end to imposed scarcity and a return to the pre-crisis compromise. Rather, they are articulating anti-austerity with a bottom-up critique of the local state and a deeper desire to democratise urban life.

Chapter 5 focuses on the hidden care work that takes place in the mortuary. The concept of ‘care’ has been used by sociologists to explore a range of issues (for example, nurture, treatment, protection or work) in various settings, from children’s homes to residential care for older people. Care is often the central focus of sociological research on palliative or end-of-life ‘care’. In contrast, ethnographies of post-mortem practice tend to focus on the scientific rather than emotional or care work involved. Drawing on data from the study, we explore the various care practices enacted by different types of health professionals (such as bathing, dressing and talking to babies) that take place in the mortuary. These practices, although hidden from the view of the public and some other clinical staff, were often crucial to parental and professional experience of the post-mortem process. By uncovering some of these hidden care practices the chapter seeks to extend existing sociological literature in this field.

The penultimate chapter seeks to bring together literature from the sociology of the family and intimacy with the interdisciplinary field of death and dying studies to explore perinatal loss through a relational lens. It does this to examine the role of relationships across the journey of reproductive loss. The chapter begins by exploring the impact of baby loss and grief on intimate relationships and wider family members (for example, grandparents, aunts and uncles). It also explores the ways in which parents’ experiences of post-mortem practice are also deeply informed by biological connections and social relationships. While most of the chapter focuses specifically on the impact of baby loss on family relationships, it also examines the role that friends, work colleagues and health professionals can play. This is because bereavement is embedded in all social relationships. The chapter concludes by highlighting the socially embedded nature of baby loss, reinforcing the centrality of social relations across the entire baby loss journey.

As symbols of immense private and corporate wealth, sites of public commemoration for national and sub-national communities, and flash-points of protest, architectural icons mark an important entry point for the analysis of urban politics. This chapter looks at the myriad of different mechanisms by which contemporary architecture operates to produce and fix symbolic meanings that promote the neoliberal project. These are related to the visual, the discursive and the performative characteristics of architecture and urban space. While the attribution of iconicity entails a judgement based on aesthetics and recognisability – hence the focus on monumentality, and eye-catching and sculptural design of volumes and surfaces – meanings attached to architecture and urban space are constructed through explanatory discourse and visual representation, marketing campaigns, symbolic ceremony and spatial regulation. The chapter also explores the ways in which the meanings attached to iconic architecture can be subverted in order to make inequalities visible and, ultimately, contest the neoliberal emphasis on growth-oriented competitive policies and governmentalities that are, ultimately, the cause of systemic inequality.

This work explores gendered exclusion from public space. The research focus is on the lived experience of women in Manchester, UK, and data was collected via a series of walking interviews. Women discuss the impact of street harassment and everyday sexism alongside coping strategies that they develop to enable them to claim their place in the city. There are also examples of how policy decisions and poor design can entrench and amplify gendered exclusion. The chapter concludes with some examples of creative resistance to misogyny. An intersectional approach is taken, which acknowledges differences between women, and the value and importance of diversity and equality in public space is asserted throughout.

To understand the current multi-level crisis of legitimation facing the British state requires a historical perspective. This chapter explores how the democratic settlement that is unravelling today was incrementally put in place over the course of a century between the 1850s and 1940s. It demonstrates that Britain’s journey towards democracy was the product of a convoluted set of interactions between the emergence of the working class as a social force and the desire of imperial and Labour elites to maintain social order and thereby ensure continued imperialist expansion and uninterrupted capital accumulation. While Liberal and Conservative imperial elites democratised and racialized the national polity by incorporating a layer of skilled Anglo-Saxon working-class men with the intention of blocking the re-emergence of a multi-ethnic insurgent proletariat, the Labour bloc consolidated this process of materially and symbolically differentiating the proletariat by situating its demands for more general working-class inclusion on the same ideological terrain of national belonging. Therefore, a shared commitment to racializing nationalisms and empire were constitutive features of the politics of both ruling blocs that helped secure voting rights and social welfare for the working class in this period.

This chapter again considers a set of localised anxieties in Johannesburg. It examines posts on the community Facebook group of the formerly white suburb of Melville, in the west of the city. This is a relatively liminal space: its residents are not homogenous in terms of race, age, class or income and it is geographically closer to the city centre than other suburbs. A magnet for artists, academics and journalists, it is also known for its supposedly bohemian, ‘liberal’ character. The chapter discusses a series of posts on the I Love Melville page, showing the dual injunctions and desires that group members express: firstly, to ensure that they are ‘safe’, and secondly, to actively perform humanitarian ‘goodness’. It uses Richard Ballard’s work on suburbs, race and belonging in South Africa (2005, 2003) to think about what Melville means as a spatial designation, and Lilie Chouliaraki’s ideas about ‘post-humanitarianism’ (2012, 2010) to consider the contradictory nature of these urges, in that the collective desire for safety involves an ongoing low-level anxiety about the presence of poor and black people while the desire to do good usually involves collective actions of providing money or goods to poor and black people. The chapter discusses racialised fears and performative humanitarianism to show how suburban South Africans attempt to construct their identities within intersecting discourses of risk, rights, safety, charity and tolerance.

Chapter 3 focuses directly on the post-mortem examination, centring its analysis on the development of minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI is often perceived to be the ‘gold standard’ in healthcare. Its use in autopsy, however, signals the emergence of a novel application of the technology. Drawing on data from the study, this chapter explores parents’ and professionals’ feelings towards post-mortem MRI. For parents, MRI can be used to plan a less medicalised birth/death. It offers important information about why their baby died. The MRI image validates their baby’s existence, offering parents an important sense of closure. While post-mortem examination using MRI was not available to several parents in the study, most expressed an interest in this becoming more accessible in the future. This view was readily shared by professionals, especially when parents did not wish to consent to a full post-mortem. The chapter concludes by focusing on this novel technological application, exploring the extent to which MRI can enable us to reconceptualise ‘life’ beyond the old boundaries of ‘death’.