This chapter focuses on how certain kinds of images and stories were mobilised by communities, city administrators and marketers to form a totalising imaginary of 'city zones' such as Manchester's Gay Village. These images concealed the lived experiences of many and prevented an appreciation of the dangers and affective realities of such users of urban space. It is a tension drawn from the kind of Cartesian mapping critiqued by Doreen Massey who argues that space, rather than being composed solely of the physical plane, is best conceived of as relational in aspect. The chapter shows a story of the village produced in collaboration with Peter Dalton, a nineteen-year-old man who 'did business. The spoken negotiations involved in doing business often involved a measure of ambiguity between what was said and what was implied.

This chapter examines how Dreamfields' 'high expectations' are steeped in raced and classed norms that extirpate heterogeneity. Belief is cultivated through the use of repetition and morality tales that smooth over the various contradictions and ambiguities inherent in Dreamfields' approach. Culford's position as principal and archetypal masculine figurehead is paramount due to his dictatorial management style and his embodiment of the ethos. Culford symbolises Dreamfields' mission, embodying its mantra as a self-made, mixed-race man of modest working-class origins who has made it to the top. Dreamfields aligns its mission with the pursuit of equality, while simultaneously refuting the structuring importance of race and class on positioning. Dreamfields chose a traditional uniform aligning the student body with 'smart' middle-class professional bodies, signifying normality and announcing that Dreamfields students were just like other Goldport professionals heading to work.

This chapter aims to make a small contribution to media studies from a sociological perspective by reflecting on some of the wider contexts and issues relating to the rationale for studies in this field. It describes the changing nature of the media and wider social contexts in which the relationship between the Olympics and media has developed. The chapter looks at the symbiotic relationship which developed and continues to endure between the Olympics and the old media, particularly television. It also describes that the changing social context involved in the growth of new media, together with the potential for the growth of positive relations between the Olympics and the new media. The chapter presents the discussion of the new media's positive possibilities, together also with its negative possibilities, for the Olympics and major sport events.

This chapter explores the enduring myths about the phenomenon of serial murder generally and serial killers in particular, in Britain between 1960 to the present. The Chapter argues that many of these myths have been created and continue to be perpetuated by the print and broadcast media. It is suggested that this process was ignited by American popular culture about serial murder, to the extent that many British students engaged on university courses do so because they want to emulate the heroine of the popular novel The Silence of the Lambs and become the fictional character, Clarice Starling. This observation is used to explore other myths about offender profiling, the role of the profiler in police investigations and the idea that this involves entering the mind of the serial killer by the profiler. Based on his own applied work with serial murderers and on police investigations and after their conviction, the chapter reveals the realities of the phenomenon of serial murder, serial killers and the limits of offender profiling. The chapter uses a number of situations encountered during police investigations and with serial killers to illustrate its arguments. It concludes that we need to harness, rather than dismiss, student interests in this territory in more productive ways. It adopts a structural/victim perspective about serial murder, as opposed to a relentless focus on what might motivate the serial killer to kill. The chapter suggests how this might be done both within the academy and, more broadly in public policy.

Catherine Maignant’s chapter deals with Tony Flannery, another Irish priest whose writings and liberal media pronouncements led to a caution from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which disqualifies him from publishing work or accepting invitations to express his views at public events without seeking prior permission from Rome. Maignant argues that Flannery has all the traits of a Christian witness, in that he is a prophet who appears to be reviled by certain forces within his own Church for daring the express unpalatable truths. Notwithstanding his censure, he has continued to write and to air his sometimes-daring opinions, all the while knowing that they could eventually lead to his excommunication.

This chapter debates that engaging urban futures as a heuristic reveals important tensions connected to future developments and imagined uses of the city centre. It shows that the process of eliciting visions and imaginary of the future of Manchester city centre renders explicit some of the value judgments and priorities that different stakeholders may pursue. The chapter draws on research conducted on Manchester city centre between 2011 and 2014, using qualitative mixed-methods. Drawing on Science and Technologies Studies (STS), and specifically on the sociology of expectation, the chapter provides a theorisation of the processes of visioning, for increasing democratic scrutiny and contributing to more socially resilient policy making. The chapter describes some of Manchester city centre's salient features, and discusses its future trajectories and its resident population.

This chapter explores the Assessment of Need (AoN) process as a governmental technology which literally brings into being a new classification of people with disabilities and their assessed needs as governable entities. Governmentality literature has provided a fruitful hunting ground in terms of finding conceptual tools to analyse the ways in which states problematise and govern 'the wealth, health and happiness of populations'. Ireland has witnessed significant developments in the domain of disability policy and legislation. In a declared commitment to furthering the participation of people with disabilities in society, the government published a National Disability Strategy in 2004, the cornerstone of which was the passing of the Disability Act 2005. The chapter explores the spaces in-between the rationalities of particular policy programmes on the one hand, and the end point of many Foucauldian studies, namely the creation of self-governing subjects, on the other.

The structural violence present in contemporary ecological systems, and in the capitalist relations that currently produce them, is made visible in Scottish fishing wrecks. Structural violence experienced through work, over the course of a person's life, can build to an increasingly traumatic 'state of emergency' that people must 'get used to' in order to maintain their livelihood. Fishermen and seafarers who did confront the constant danger posed by the impossible contradictions they had to cope with usually left the industry, or carried on in a jittery traumatised state. The contradictions between the logics of the market and of seamanship were most vividly illustrated in how it affected fishermen's judgement of the weather. In the case of fishermen, the mainstream ideology of nature subordinates their health and well-being not only to their seafood 'products', but to the whole environment they work in and have made productive.

Eamonn Wall’s discussion of Irish American Catholic experience reveals many similarities on either side of the pond, and some differences also. The Irish American authors and commentators provide unique perspectives on many facets of Irish life, including the unique role played by the Catholic Church. Among the authors discussed are Frank McCourt, whose account of a poor Catholic childhood in Limerick is so memorably captured in the best-seller, Angela’s Ashes, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín and Mary Gordon. Similarly, the theologian Richard P. McBrien, journalist and writer Maureen Dezell, and sociologist Andrew Greely combine to illustrate the impact that the Irish Church has had on its American equivalent. Wall maintains that looking towards Ireland from the US, and drawing on American notions of egalitarianism and individual freedom, sometimes allows for a more dispassionate view of Ireland’s Catholic heritage and enables envisaging its future with a far greater clarity than can be achieved when change is all around you.

This chapter begins by mapping the key questions framing the research and begins to explore the Dreamfields ethos. It examines how the birth and development of the academies programme embeds and extends a vision of marketised education originating in the 1980s. Former Minister of State for Education Lord Adonis described how the schools would build aspirational cultures and act as 'engines of social mobility and social justice' at the 'vanguard of meritocracy'. The chapter provides a contextualised study of the education market in action by showing the implications neoliberal reforms and a result-driven focus have on the shaping of subjectivities. Academies have faced opposition for their lack of democratic accountability as they can set their own labour conditions, deviate from the national curriculum and operate outside local authority control.

Joe Cleary’s chapter examines what the future of the Catholic Church is now that one of the great threats to its hegemony during the twentieth century, communism, has fallen largely into abeyance. Will the Church continue to align itself with capitalism and ignore the steady grip of the associated neoliberal agenda that favours secular, material values over religious ones? In contemporary Ireland, it often seems as though a blind adherence to religion has been replaced by an equally blind embrace of neoliberalism. Cleary asks what psychological price the Irish will pay for their submissive compliance with the fashionable ideas of the moment and explores how a healthy relationship with the Church might be developed in such a changed cultural environment.

This chapter provides an introduction to the commodification of prostheses in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and United States. By addressing some of the main processes used to commodify prostheses - invention, design and production; use and consumption; and promotion and patenting – it highlights how the medical profession, surgical instruments makers and individuals with physical impairments not only participated in shaping markets for new and modified assistive devices, but by doing so, redefined what it meant to be ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’ in this period. It argues that the redefinition of disability in this period – as a medical affliction that needed to be ‘corrected’ – led to the rise of disability rights activism in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The previously little explored history of prostheses commodification, introduced here, formed no small part in the rise of these movements.