This chapter explores the relationship between the experiences of poverty, the penalisation of poverty through state and bureaucratic disciplinary measures, and ethical decision making in everyday life in one of the poorest areas of Britain Harpurhey, Manchester. The struggles to engage with a law-and-order state in Harpurhey involve everyday decision making and strategising as to when and in what vein one might exercise ethical and moral judgment. The chapter addresses the ethical dimensions of social life by exploring the everyday practice of self-policing in Harpurhey as a practice of evaluation and judgment of situations that present momentous ethical dilemmas or moral breakdowns. Self-policing of conflicts and tensions is an ordinary practice in everyday life in Harpurhey. The chapter explores the tensions and ambiguities of ethical development through the ways in which individuals police the behaviours of themselves and each other.

This chapter examines both the phenomenological experience of places and how these experiences have been affected by changing seafood markets, ecological, social and language change, and militarisation of the coast. Wullie's Peak is one of many places that are part of trawler fishermen's working practices and everyday conversations yet are completely invisible from the sea's surface and not related to any place on shore. The Peak became Wullie's through his work there, and through the 'good craic' and playful radio conversations he shared with other trawl skippers working in the area. Places could also incorporate global social and military history, for example, 'The Burma', a tow located north of Wullie's Peak. The naming and discussion of The Burma was good craic. The Burma reflects the international work experience of many people living in the Highlands, usually either as soldiers or working on cargo ships.

This chapter explores how students navigate Dreamfields' conveyor belt while learning how to imagine themselves and their future in particular ways. Whereas many working-class and ethnic-minority students often disinvest in education and 'know their limits' after repeated experiences of academic failure, Dreamfields presents a limitless landscape where investment is mandatory. Ambivalent feelings rest at the heart of Dreamfields' project as future fantasies promising happiness and enjoyment are allied to the present-day endurance of heightened control, discipline and securitisation. Several students discussed how they coped with Dreamfields' disciplinary structures by feigning compliance. As Bondi and Laurie discuss, neoliberalism actively works to deplete and constrain activism; Dreamfields' systems teach students the pointlessness of attempting to make their voices heard from the outset. Loss and gain becomes a raced and classed process, where students must move away from essentialised representations of blackness and working-classness to better fit into the Dreamfields landscape.

In this chapter, the author utilizes ideas drawn from governmentality to explore the emergence, and sometimes uneasy co-existence, of the biomedical discourses in the mental health policy arena. As Michel Foucault and other authors have noted, discourses constructing mental health have been strongly tied to biomedical understandings of mental illness and the medical speciality of psychiatry. The operational elements of A Vision for Change: Report of the Expert Group on Mental Health Policy (AVFC) betray the claims to whole-population relevance of mental health and reinforce a narrow conception of mental health as a euphemism for mental illness. The theoretical framework of governmentality can be helpful in exploring tensions between the mentalities and practices of governing, and discourses as they have developed around mental health policy and practice in Ireland.

This chapter explores globalisation's world-regionality dynamic and its implications for mega-events. It discusses the role of mega-events such as the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and the Shanghai 2010 Expo and their legacies in China's contemporary development, both at the national level and also particularly at the urban level. China's rapid economic growth and urbanisation in the post-Deng period generated an unprecedented interest among Chinese urban leaderships in strategies of bidding for and staging mega-events. The design of the 2010 Shanghai Expo reflected a number of the macro factors and structural themes relating to contemporary China and to mega-events, as well as more local and urban issues relating to Shanghai city. The chapter also discusses the influence of mega-events on the development of London as a world city, and looks in particular at the London 2012 Olympic Games and its urban legacies.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores the potential of governmentality-inspired ideas to develop a more nuanced and indeed critical understanding of the construction of health-based policy in Ireland. One of the key points underpinning accusations of governmentality's limited critical potential relates to the suggestion that studies often fail to capture the messy actualities of social and political relations. The book provides a clear example of how different and often competing voices, each drawing on different types of knowledge, build into governmental visions and approaches to organ donation. It illustrates how the management of obesity is increasingly being placed in the hands of individuals, by vesting them with a technology designed to monitor their waist circumference.

Research into the urban impacts of Olympic events, as of mega-events more generally, has long been of variable quality. Mega-events and their associated costs naturally reflect the long-term inflationary movement of prices in modern economies. This chapter begins by looking from early Olympic Games onwards on the construction of sport facilities. It looks, on the one hand the arguably negative Olympic legacy cases of the Montreal 1976 and Athens 2004 Games events, and on the other hand the widely recognised positive Olympic legacy case of the Barcelona games of 1992. The chapter looks into the mega-event projects and the equally unavoidable struggles they involve and the determination they require from their planners and organisers to promote positive event legacies in host cities and avoid the risks of negative legacies.

This chapter seeks to analyse the reform process initiated in 2005, examining the policy tools used to improve care provision and their impact on older people. It examines the impact of recent budgetary constraints on the long-term care sector, as a result of the recession in Ireland's free market economy. The chapter also examines how older people are conceptualised and analyses the relationships between the state and other stakeholders in the design and implementation of long-term care reform policies between 2005 and 2015. It is guided by a governmentality perspective, critically analysing the changing power relations within the long-term care sector in Ireland. Drawing on the particular conceptualisation of power, Michel Foucault developed the concept of governmentality, or 'the art of government'. Foucault's work on governmentality has been used by many other scholars as a framework for analysing power relations in society.

The Irish government has developed policies that set out its vision, priorities and direction for improving and sustaining the health of its people. This chapter critically appraises how these strategies have been configured to structure responsibility for health. It exposes a number of key characteristics of neoliberal governmentality, including the shift towards a market-based model of health, and the distribution of power across a range of agents and agencies of health. The need to reduce healthcare expenditure appeared in the first national, strategic public health policy, Shaping a Healthier Future. The chapter illustrates three evolving rationalities in strategic public health policies in Ireland. They are a market-based model of healthcare, devolution of responsibility, and capabilities and techniques to manage the self and ensure individual behaviour aligns with political objectives.

This chapter explores the organising effects: how sea creatures like crabs and prawns were made into tradeable commodities, and how commodity relations affected ownership of boats and gear and the distribution of the fishing surplus among owners and crew. The development of the live whole prawn market with 'a better price' was crucial to the revival of the prawn creel fishery, a more labour-intensive method of fishing which could not otherwise compete with the trawlers on price. The chapter demonstrates the understanding that political economy can bring to anthropological and fishing studies, and also in understanding 'why things are this way'. Fisheries anthropologist Charles Menzies argues that an understanding of the pressures of capitalist commodity production, and the social relations it requires, are important to understanding fisheries. Fisheries are frequently described as if their existence was a natural fact that simply reflects the presence of fish.

This chapter adds to historical studies of artificial body parts by exploring the reciprocal relationship between fictional texts and the prosthesis industry in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Focussing primarily on prostheses—including artificial legs, dentures, and glass eyes—in relation to female users, it demonstrates that fictional writing was a key component of nineteenth-century prosthesis discourse. The chapter argues that literary stories provided practical advice for readers on the kinds of prostheses that should be avoided for both social and functional purposes. Women in particular were targeted as consumers who should pay special attention when choosing prostheses. Popular literary sources, often packaged as marriage plots, provided kinds of advertisements not for but against certain prostheses. Meanwhile, both entire fictional works and particular representational strategies were used by contemporary prosthetists interchangeably as means through which to subtly disparage the devices of opposing makers, reinforce the proprietary ownership of particular designs, or promote the concealing abilities of particular devices to female users.

This chapter draws insight from fieldwork in Manchester where a nurturing approach by an events organisation, working with multiple community groups and stakeholders in the creation of a major civic parade, led to an emergent entity than a directed one. The cultural, political and socio-economic history of Manchester provided important contextual understanding of the city dynamics, together with ethnographies and studies of parades and festivals in other cities. The parade is an aspect of urban dynamics within Manchester as a city, and therefore acts an index embedded in, constituted by and impacting on other relationships, objects and indices. The nurturing emergent parade making process could be developed into a constructive nurturing emergent city making process to address the dichotomous task of both representing the city as democratically appointed officials and enabling and supporting citizens to realise their own ambitions.