This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book first traces the connections and ruptures in the experience of people, mostly men, mostly Scottish, as they work in the prawn and other fisheries on the west coast of Scotland. The author's research centred on human-environment relations at sea, which made the best use of his own skills and experience as a professional seafarer, and provided a wealth of rich opportunities for participant observation. The book then traces the development of fishing grounds and other places at sea, people's use of tools and machines to extend their bodily senses and capabilities into the sea, and techniques for orienting themselves and navigating at sea. The book further shows how political economy structures these experiences and histories and has created a situation of unacknowledged structural violence for people working in the fishing industry.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book describes how Manchester's civic administration has responded to calls to reduce its carbon emissions. It traces the development of the lounge and an attendant notion of 'loungification'. The book explores the tensions in how organisational processes and community aspirations are negotiated through physical sites in urban spaces. It argues that combining narratives of success and community with imagery and maps characterise and regulate Manchester's Gay Village as a distinct, bordered, hedonistic and particularly tolerant place. The book focuses on Manchester city centre to argue that exploring the futures that different stakeholders envisage for the city centre reveals tensions that are otherwise glossed over. It explores how people's lives interact with the dynamics of urban transformation and development in their daily experiences. Urban ethnography contributes to the analyses of cities across multiple disciplines.

This chapter explores the relationship between mega-events and cities in the context of long-term social change and with particular reference to the important theme of the significance of social space for modern cities. It looks at the 'green city' awareness during the first phase of modernisation, with particular reference to the history of the creation and changing public uses of urban parks in the course of the modern development of Western cities. The chapter focuses on Expos and a general exploration of their history of operating as urban park-creating projects, and thus as both space-creating and green projects. It also focuses on a set of case studies of Expos as urban policy projects, particularly in terms of their space-creating, park-creating and green aspects. The cases are those of the European set of contemporary-era Expos, namely Seville 1992 and particularly Lisbon 1998 and Zaragoza 2008.

This chapter describes how Dreamfields responds to narratives of failure, the demands of the education market, and anxieties over national decline. Dreamfields is disciplined through a variety of practices to ensure its 'well-oiled machine' routinely fashions its raw materials in accordance with global capital's needs. The chapter describes how space, time and the body are (re)ordered through repetitive routines and surveillance which mesh various modes of discipline, ranging from panoptic surveillance to verbal chastisement to audit systems' measurement to create the neoliberal subject. Drawing on de Certeau's concept of strategies, it describes how Dreamfields as a subject with 'will and power' isolates itself, establishing a 'break between a place appropriated as one's own and its other'. This is a useful way to think through Dreamfields' demarcation of itself as a space apart from Urbanderry from where it can manage exterior threats.

Sharon Tighe-Mooney’s chapter sees the divorce, contraception and abortion referenda of the 1980s and 90s as a watershed for Irish women, as these were issues that impacted directly on their lives. Tighe-Mooney examines the events of the past four decades in Irish society in the context of the weakening hegemony of the Catholic Church juxtaposed with the growing realisation by women, especially when the child abuse scandals broke, that their lives had been framed by a celibate male-dominated institution that displayed serious double standards in the area of human sexuality. She argues that in order to survive into the future, the Church will be increasingly dependent on women remaining active within the institution. As Irish women Catholics are demanding a central role in the running of a Church that has shown itself allergic to change, especially when it comes to gender equality, Tighe-Mooney wonders what the future holds for both groups.

Louise Fuller claims that there can be no doubt that Irish Catholicism is in serious decline. The decline itself is no huge surprise: it is the extent of the implosion and the consequences this has had on Irish society that require explanation. The ‘aggressive secularism’ that is now commonplace has led to a situation where it has become extremely difficult to express a Catholic viewpoint in the public arena, a situation that is as unhealthy in its own way as the theocracy that dominated for far too long in Ireland. Major changes in how it communicates the Word of God will be necessary if the Church is to have any hope of reengaging the minds and hearts of a population that is becoming theologically illiterate and indifferent to religious observance of any type.

This chapter provides an ethnographic description of political relations in the city of Manchester by focusing on the attempts to distribute responsibility for reductions in the city's carbon emissions. It discusses the process of inclusion from the perspective of some of those people working in partnership with the local Council. The chapter focuses on the formation of the city of Manchester's environmental policy and response to the 2008 Climate Change Act. The broader field of environmental politics in the city was often characterised by pointing to an important but uneasy relationship between 'activists' and 'officers'. The chapter considers how the organisations who were being invited to be incorporated into the distributed form of politics responded to being part of the 'stab vest' organisation. Supporters of an entrepreneurial approach to urban politics in Manchester have argued that public-private partnerships have been the basis for a positive transformation of the city.

The First World War witnessed an unprecedented scale of amputation. Traditionally, it has been argued that design and innovation were a direct result of the numbers of prostheses required to re-embody the many thousands of amputees from the war. This chapter argues that innovations in artificial limbs were well-established in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, there were a number of reputable companies that maintained a good trade in artificial limbs. The surgical profession and the commercial arena, while aware of each other, operated separately in two spheres. The First World War physically narrowed this division, relocating the limb fitter and the surgeon in close proximity in specialist hospitals established for amputees. Many manufacturers, including some from overseas, were required to provide the amputee servicemen with limbs, yet the relationship between the two professions was not improved. Nevertheless, the specialist hospitals staffed with experts in surgical technique and artificial limb fitting benefitted a number of patients. Focusing on Queen Mary Roehampton Hospital, this chapter explores the relationship between physical spaces and professionals, and the impact that it has on medical care in the First World War.

Justin Carville draws on recent debates in relation to photography and the everyday in order to examine the role of street-photography in the cultural politics of religion as it was played out in the quotidian moments of social relations within Dublin’s urban and suburban spaces during the 1980s and 90s. The essay argues that photography was important in giving visual expression to the social contradictions within the relations between religion and the transformation of Irish social life, not through the dramatic and traumatic experiences that defined the nation’s increased secularism, but in the quiet, humdrum and sometimes monotonous routines of religious ceremonies and everyday social relations.

This chapter explores how the efforts to increase the availability of human organs by moving to an institutional arrangement based on presumed consent necessarily extend beyond shaping people's cultural attitude towards organ donation. Transforming the prevailing cultural attitude and habitual behaviour in respect of organ donation also requires subtle but significant shifts in how people imagine the dead body, the individual and her or his responsibilities to others, and the limits of medicine. The chapter considers the debates in light of the ideas of Michel Foucault about the construction and government of the modern individual. Central to Foucault's conceptualisation of governmentality is that the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual, homo economicus, co-determined each other's emergence. Peter Wehling is ambivalent about the emergence of active biological citizenship, which he regards as a new and significant element in contemporary governmental regimes of medicine.