Building on various theoretical perspectives on borders and bodies this chapter contributes to the critique of racialised, hardening boundaries and processes of exclusion that occur in the context of obligations and entitlements to health and wellbeing in Europe. It presents findings from a collaborative ethnographic account from a multi-diverse neighbourhood in Bochum and its inhabitants’ access to health from the critical vantage point of that community. The research for this article was conducted by members of the City Lab Bochum and the results emerge from three years of intermittent ethnographic research the author conducted in the neighbourhood between 2015 and 2019. It shows, with Fassin, how borders as external territorial frontiers interrelate with multiple boundaries as internal social categorisations and affect migrants in the study area. An ethnographic account of a newly migrated family indicates the necessity for wider structural changes that decisively reduce or even put to an end peoples’ informal exclusion from healthcare. Moreover, this research depicts how health-related interventions for people living in precarious contexts should not be limited to the healthcare system but rather address a wider institutional landscape. Based on the findings the chapter comes up with concrete strategies to counter peoples’ uncertain futures by creating space for radical diversity.

Chapter 8 discusses the legacy of northern soul beyond the 1970s and through to its revival in the present day. It also explores the construction and dissemination of particular myths and histories of northern soul. The chapter investigates northern soul’s propensity to look back on its own emergence and development and its need to create its own icons and symbols, both during its heyday in the 1970s and into the twenty-first century. The chapter provides details of post-Wigan venues such as the Top of the World, Stafford, and the global reach of the scene in Europe and Japan. There is a critical reading of the way in which northern soul has been characterised in fiction, autobiography and on stage and screen. The chapter describes the ways in which the scene has become part of the wider working-class soundscape of places such as Blackpool and Benidorm.

This book examines the relationship between popular music and everyday life. Northern soul was just one of a multiplicity of music scenes, genres and trends that were central to working-class experiences, feelings and identities. The introduction provides a critical reading of the sociological and historical literature on post-war youth culture and popular music. It argues that listening to music was a coping strategy in dealing with the rigours and exhaustions of school, work and domestic alienation as well as a soundtrack that accompanied memories of particular time periods, episodes and events. In presenting northern soul as more than just a hobby or cultural diversion for its consumers, the book is unashamedly empathetic. As the working class continue to be caricatured, marginalised and, notably, largely absent from the upper realms of academia it is important that their experiences, emotions and histories are recorded, published and disseminated.

The chapter details the transatlantic connections between black American music and its audience in Britain through the growth of interest in soul music in general and ‘rare soul’ in particular. There is an assessment of the Motown Revue Tour that traversed Britain during 1965: the soul club scene that emerged in its wake, the importance of the venues in which this music was played, and the growth of an associated culture. Central to the northern soul scene was a club culture that was linked to a number of British cities and towns that retained a distinctive working-class identity. There is an examination of the music and atmosphere of the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and the plethora of soul clubs that were satellites of this foundation club of northern soul. These spaces are explored in the context of the cultural life of the working class in Manchester and the surrounding towns that had been built on the economy of coal and cotton.

This chapter the focuses on the political projects that emerge from the critical approaches discussed in the book. Frankfurt School inspired critical theorists within International Relations have focused on the notion of ‘emancipation’. However, this is a very problematic term – who gets to decide what emancipation is, and how do we move from the situation that we are in to an emancipated one? Poststructuralists have been particularly wary of the term ‘emancipation’ suggesting that emancipatory projects inevitably involve replacing one set of oppressive relations with another. The focus for poststructuralist thinkers is on revealing power relations and ‘resistance’. Does this however imply ultimately a nihilistic perspective and the abandonment of any hope of a more progressive world order? The priority for posthumanists is a rethinking of relations between human and non-human nature. This re-thinking can be viewed in a self-interested way; in order to maintain a survivable environment for humans on the planet. Alternatively it can be understood as an attempt to reduce the level of suffering that humans impose on the life with which we share the planet.

Chapter 3 explores the origins and development of Wigan Casino. It situates the club in the longer history of the town, which had been built on coal mining and a concomitant working-class culture that remained prominent in the 1970s. There is a detailed discussion of the music, and the individuals who attended the club’s famous ‘all-nighters’. It draws on a range of primary sources to reveal both the ‘localism’ and ‘nationalism’ of Wigan Casino and how it was able to broaden its appeal to construct a particular identity in becoming an international brand. The Casino is read as a symbol of the changing nature of particular British towns and cities in a period of rising unemployment and deindustrialisation. Wigan Casino became the iconic club for later interpretations and readings of northern soul.

The chapter analyses policy debates to explore the ways in which pronatalism has influenced the formation of reproductive and childcare policies in the Czech Republic. It shows that the pronatalist framing has been activated in the construction of reproductive and childcare policies to enhance the demographic and economic sustainability of the state by means of its internal reproduction and control, since the formation of Czechoslovakia. The analysis shows that how the situation at a given time is defined has been more important for determining policies than the actual birth rate trend. The chapter argues that the pronatalist framing was often used to increase the salience of a problem and the need to accept the policy solution defined within other frames. However, pronatalist framing also brought new meanings to the definition of the problem. While it has sometimes been instrumental in promoting certain measures advocated by feminists, it has always built on the gendered obligation to reproduce, has intruded on the bodily and sexual citizenship of some women, LGBTQ+ people, and persons of marginalised ethnicities and nationalities, and has buttressed the current limitations of the reproductive rights.

This chapter explores racial identities and how they were understood and reconstructed through the northern soul scene. The multiracial and anti-racist aspects of northern soul are critically assessed in order to challenge existing assumptions. Critically, the chapter notes the transatlantic aspect of northern soul and the dynamics connected with the reception and interpretation of what was perceived as an essentially black American musical genre consumed by a largely white British working-class audience. The chapter also unpicks tensions within the scene around notions of gender and sexuality. Northern soul seemingly constructed a space where young men and women shared a commitment to music and dance. In contrast to other leisure activities, women were said to have played an equal role. Moreover, many felt that the scene provided a safer environment than conventional nightclubs and discos where women were seen as sexual objects seeking heterosexual relationships. Yet this view has been somewhat romanticised and it is clear that northern soul was heavily gendered, with males often policing aspects of the scene and defining what was and what was not northern soul. The chapter concludes with some discussion of the sexuality of the scene in the period when commercial disco presented a challenge – both real and perceived – to the music policy of some of the most prominent northern soul clubs.

This chapter explores how the relationship between labour relations, healthcare policy, and institutional arrangements shape care work through a combined focus on situated work experiences in the feminised and increasingly multi-cultural municipal healthcare sector and on policy discourse and policy framing in Norway. The chapter identifies and describes labour relations, labour experiences, and the part-time employment ‘culture’ in the care services, and the ways healthcare services and care work are envisioned in recent policy. Development in the labour market over the last decade, spurred by amongst other thing migration and the welfare state ‘crisis’, has changed the institutional conditions of labour. Based on examination of political discourse and on data from fieldwork in three Norwegian municipalities, the chapter aims at a multi-level analysis of labour relations in the municipal care sector in order to show the ways a ‘shifting institutional ecology’ opens for precarity of labour in Norway. The key argument of the chapter is that the shifting boundaries of politics have created problems where labour falls outside of the policy frame, something that contributes to a debasing of (care) work as a political category and to the emergence of precarious labour, often naturalised as flexibility, in the public care services.

Chapter 4 charts the fragmentation and diversification of northern soul during the late 1970s. It illustrates the tensions and schisms that were created in the later years of northern soul’s pre-eminence. Such fragmentation is explored through a number of themes; musical preferences (‘oldies’ and ‘newies’), factionalism between DJs and fans, new genres and styles in black music, the changing aspirations and tastes of consumers, the rise of rival venues and the increasing popularity of ‘all-dayers’. At the heart of these tensions was a debate which ran to the core of what northern soul was, or had become. There is a detailed examination of the challenges posed by shifts in soul music styles such as New York disco and jazz funk. The chapter draws on a range of primary sources in making sense of the politics of the dance floor in clubs such as Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca and Cleethorpes Pier.

The chapter addresses the much-publicised disaster that occurred in the proximity of the island of Lampedusa, Italy, in October 2013, leading to the death of hundreds of mainly Eritrean migrants at sea. In addition to discussing responses to the disasters, the chapter counters established ways of reporting such disasters where fatality metrics and distantiation are dominant modes of representation. The authors argue for more ethical and reciprocal ways for research, where emphasis is on testimonies and narratives, especially by those who have witnessed the incident at first hand. The acts of telling and listening emerge as ways for foregrounding the human aspects of the disaster and produce more balanced and horizontal relationships between researchers and interviewees. The two testimonies, ‘performances of a story’, by an Eritrean survivor and an Italian rescuer, presented as parts of memory workshops and providing individual responses to the event by first-hand witnesses, show that narratives and images play a role in transforming the borderscape and despectacularising migration and disasters.