While the idiom of the house has been drawn up in a multitude of different areas of English social, political and cultural life in the present, it has not provided any satisfactory answers or directions for our future. As such it is suggested that the idiom of the house ought to be viewed as what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called a Thing: an empty void into which we have projected our inaccessible desires to guarantee the preservation of a view of English society which is no longer possible, morally permissible, or even desirable. Instead, we could view ourselves not as heirs to a tradition but, rather, as contingent remainders: those people who signal more the crisis and imperfections of a society where kinship and inheritance play so central a role. We could give up the ghost of the house and think of ourselves as freer to be together in new and collaborative ways.

The United States spends close to half of the world’s healthcare bill, yet this huge industry does not produce good health. Citizens believe the US is the best at almost everything. In the 1950s we were one of the healthiest nations. Now, comparisons show more diseases present in Americans than in the citizens of the other rich nations, even when considering the healthiest subpopulations here. Life expectancy is now declining here, a unique situation for advanced countries. This plight results in almost 800 excess deaths per day that wouldn’t happen in other nations. Well-being mirrors mortality here and has been declining, despite our pursuing happiness with all the advanced technology in our palms. Reasons include our high income inequality and poor social safety net

Social work’s fundamental roots in social justice and human rights have fostered an urgent call for social workers to actively engage in antiracist social work practice. However, social workers face the challenge of translating theoretical concepts into concrete antiracist practices and interventions. This chapter aims to provide one approach social workers may adopt to integrate Critical Race Theory (CRT) in clinical settings. Introducing the practice tool of CRT-informed “if-then” heuristics, we focus on translating three CRT tenets into antiracism praxis recommendations: Social Construction of Race, Racism as Ordinary, and Intersectionality. We briefly describe each tenet’s theoretical contributions, introduce its related heuristic, and propose its implications for clinical practice. We also include considerations for clinical supervision and antiracist organizational leadership. Presenting a table summary of the CRT-informed “if-then” heuristics, corresponding reflexive questions, and a case vignette activity, we offer social workers several practical tools to guide efforts toward an antiracism praxis.

Chapter 6 consists of an ethnography of a provincial English town’s independent bookshop. Here, discussions about the role of reading, literature and the high-street reveal deep, underlying concerns on the meaning of ‘culture’ in English society and its relation to the ‘moral health’ of the nation. Awakening the debates on the meaning of ‘culture’ in the art-society tradition of the twentieth century, ranging from F. R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, through C. P. Snow and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, the chapter shows how the meaning of culture becomes a debate about the ethical permissibility of a traditional Englishness. We find that through interviews with the upper-class gentlemen who frequent this bookshop, and in their artistic work as writers and critics, folklorists and as readers, an aesthetic of Old Englishness emerges, an aesthetic which is used by these individuals to form a critique of the shortcomings of the present. Through constructing an aesthetic of English society in arts and letters, these individuals then pit an avaricious, and ephemeral, modernity against the certainties found in Old England.

Chapter 7 consists of an examination of the writings of upper-class society journalist and commentator Peter York and his classic 1980s series Sloane Rangers. It argues that Sloane Rangers ought to be treated as continuing a tradition of English class categorisation where social status and economic interest are exaggerated by appeals to tradition in the idiom of kinship. Sloane Rangers arose in the 1980s as a response to English deindustrialisation and the rise of an advanced neo-liberal consumer economy: in contrast to new money and widening affluence, Sloane Rangers were offered as a long standing, inherited social position, part of what York called ‘the eternal stream of English life’. Through a critical examination of York’s writings, the chapter shows that the Sloane Ranger was invented to meet a challenge: to preserve forms of social behaviour, attitudes, practices and cultural worldviews which are seen as either dying out or from a time prior to the present. As such, the status symbols of the Sloane Ranger become another way in which the present needs of capitalism draw upon old ideologies and character traits. By extending the analysis of the Sloane Ranger through to its present reincarnations in brands such as Jack Wills, we see how this sense of social practices and status symbols being repetitions from a time prior to the present is one of the ways in which economic privilege and social exclusivity go hand in hand in England.

Indigenous peoples are living increasingly translocal lives. Voluntary and involuntary movements away from home continue to present challenges for Indigenous peoples’ ideas of belonging and cultural practice. This chapter examines translocalism as it applies to experiences of Indigenous peoples in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. I examine the emergence of digital communities that transgress geographical space and facilitate Indigenous peoples’ negotiation of local and nation-state boundaries.

Floods, fires, famines, and pestilences (with Covid as the latest example): these are the conditions playing out within the Anthropocene – where human-centricity driven by patriarchal hierarchies and neo-liberal mentalities have tipped the delicate balances of Nature into devastating imbalances destroying lives, cultures, and ecosystems. Such approaches have focused on sucking from, rather than nurturing for, regeneration and sustainable futures. In the process, destabilisation is creating systemic existential threats to other-than-humans and now humans. This chapter contests the premise that human colonised/ing practices have ethical sovereignty (as authority) before, above and or beyond the actual sovereignty of Natural Systems, commonly referred to as the Universe, the Cosmos, then more specifically Planet Earth, and locally as Ngurra (Dharug language for Country). Recent work focusing on activism, highlights successful efforts to decompose hundreds of years of Anthropocentric benefit, at the expense of local, regional, and global sovereignties. It proposes that it’s within the “glocal” – activating caring through intimate localised Ngurra-knowledges, while networking globally through Indigenous relationalities, that sustainable sovereignties can be activated and re-imposed. Using a current local research project aimed at activating Indigenous knowledges, practises, and beings through place(s) within and across a large urban landscape, this chapter engages with the hindrances and the opportunities that current institutional structures, including State, corporate and community stakeholders enact as ‘sovereignty’. Exposing both the hindrances and the opportunities opens the scholarship to recognising how we can fast-track bureaucracies to activate change for the benefit of all sentience.

This chapter argues that a more adequate understanding of unemployment can be developed by building on Marx and Keynes. Both Marx and Keynes already theorise unemployment, but a better theory can be developed through a critical, Marxist appropriation of Keynesian insights. The first section identifies Marxist arguments around so-called ‘primitive accumulation’ and how the establishment of a ‘reserve army’ of labour is functional for capitalism. Suggesting that such functional arguments are useful but insufficient, the chapter accordingly continues by identify important arguments in Marx and Keynes by which agents’ motivations can be understood to reproduce unemployment. The second section identifies Marx’s depiction of imperatives to accumulate, which create alternative processes of labour recruitment and displacement, and the third section identifies how Keynes’s model of unemployment equilibrium points to situations in which entrepreneurs rationally fail to increase employment. Keynes’s model provides a potentially important ‘snap-shot’ of what need to be reconceived as dynamic and changing processes. The fourth section accordingly develops claims made by both Marx and Keynes that capital’s adjustments are uneven and hence conducive to reproducing unemployment. There are multidimensional, sectoral, temporal and spatial processes of uneven development which mean there are at most only a series of moving equilibria. The fifth section turns to states and economic policy, reiterating that states can and do act, pursuing more or less effective employment policies, and that unemployment remains a contested political achievement.

This chapter furthers and advances the decolonial process discussed in previous chapters by providing a deeper understanding of the totality of anti-oppressive practice and its embedding into direct clinical work through the clinical supervision process. Special attention is paid to complimentary theories and concepts (e.g. the cycle of socialization, relational-cultural theory, building allyship, dismantling racism, inclusive supervision and followership, etc.) that strengthen anti-oppressive decolonial supervision and leadership practice.

In Chapter 4, I investigate the formation of a deconstructivist gender and trace it to the 1980s and the end of the Cold War. First, I historicize the elision of Soviet Marxism from the avant-garde art and theory of 1970s critics of socialism to the beginning of the 1990s in queer theory. Second, I offer a close reading of queer theory texts to show that the fall of State socialism at the end of the 1980s has taken Marxism out of queer theory. In refusing the narrative that gender is only gender identity, gender became a vehicle to deconstruct categories such as man and woman (Judith Butler), historicize them (Joan Scott), or analyze how they are part of larger processes of racialization (Hortense Spillers). Unlike a Soviet Marxist epistemology, queer theorists such as Butler did not produce an aesthetic and vocabulary that were explicitly anti-capitalist. In response to this problem, I argue that the epistemology of Soviet Marxism can transform queer theory and point to novel historical possibilities for sexed bodies.

In Chapter 3, I suggest that Cold War gender is part of a broader social constructivist program in US social science. Unlike scholars such as Jemima Repo and Susan Stryker, who criticized the use of gender as an analytic, I focus on its emergence as part of an anti-communist ideology. To flesh out my claim, I analyze how gender emerged in the work of sexologist John Money as a term with anti-communist and racialized assumptions. While Money understood gender as an imprimatur that was given by society, his term was undergirded by an ideal of white Anglo-American masculinity. I also continue to explore how Cold War gender was theoretically at odds with Soviet Marxism, particularly in its racial epistemology.

The British Colonial rule ended in India in 1947 but years later, the Government of India imposed a former British colonial act called the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in 1958 on 45 million indigenous peoples who live in the region of Northeast India. The martial law led to thousands being killed in Manipur and Northeast Region besides several incidences of arrests, torture, rape and extra-judicial executions. To protest the martial law, women of Manipur started “Meira Paibi” movement meaning “Women with Bamboo Torches.” Women of Manipur do sit-ins, protest marches and bare body protest to confront the militarised violence. The article explores Foucault’s work on biopower and demonstrated how India has evolved the state of exception and allowed its military to do the “governmentality of killing” and examines how the martial law is used as an example of a technology of killing imbued with biopower which led to see Indigenous peoples as objects and functioned to regulate Indigenous lives. Inspite of these challenges, Indigenous peoples of Manipur and Northeast India have been resilient in the face of oppressive systems and people, epitomised by the rise of an Indigenous women’s epitomised in movements such as Meira Paibi Movement, the hunger strike of Irom Sharmila, the bare body protest by the mothers of Manipur. And this legacy still lives which demonstrate where there’s power, there’s resistance.

Liberation as a praxis for the helping professions is a tool of resistance aimed at increasing cultural awareness and trauma informed approaches to engaging with marginalized populations. This approach requires of each of us in the helping professions to interrogate our own relationships with anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and bigotry. In order for effective advocates to do the good work of helping people, there must be a disassociation from white supremacy and white supremacists’ ideologies. Liberation as a praxis is the only way.