The chapter maps out the competing dynamics of transparency reform, a policy with symbolic power that traps governments while becoming a site of contestation. In many countries FOI ‘survives’ because of its symbolism and attempted retrenchment is tempered by a combination of internal support and Parliamentary and media pressure. This double pressure of symbolism and support makes the policy difficult to drop, even for powerful leaders like Tony Blair or Lyndon Johnson. Yet the lack of public interest means it is symbolic but fragile and is fought over at the level of detail and, frequently, diluted.The chapter ends by looking at the future of transparency policy and whether evolving new Open Data policies will strengthens FOI or simply relocates the transparency struggle. Technological changes have had a profound impact on openness (Curtin and Meijer 2006). However, the new Open Data reforms face similar obstacles and display similar patterns to that of FOI: small groups of committed supporters, bureaucratic division and lack of clarity about detail and aims underneath a ‘symbolic’ potential (Peled 2011: Yu and Harlan 2012: Worthy 2013). New ‘Open Data’ reforms look set to continue the same difficulties rather than solve them.

This chapter explores civil society activism around bombsite reconstruction in Bali and Manhattan, during delays in post-disaster reconstruction. Organisations have protested against potential profane usage of post-terrorist space in both cases, and in the process they have inadvertently and implicitly made spatial claims about ‘sacred’ space. This chapter explores the Ground Zero Mosque (park 51) controversy, the transportation of debris from the twin towers to a Staten Island landfill site, and the Bali Peace Park campaign to reclaim the Bali bombing site, to explore how activism causes bombsites to mutate, expand and contract in their spatial constitution. The chapter interprets the civil society activism around bombsites through cultural geography to argue that mortality remains an itinerant force of anxiety until post-terrorist landscapes are rebuilt.

This chapter starts by concentrating on the question of optimism and shows that asylum is based on a cruel optimism that cannot but fail in its promise of happiness. Optimism in LGBT asylum is a combination of discourses on neoliberalism, sexuality and rights-based aspirations which imagines futures for asylum seekers and simultaneously closes them off to render them unachievable. The chapter shows how the impossibility of reaching these happy futures turns asylum into a site for the contestation by advocates and asylum seekers themselves not only of asylum policies, but also of certain forms of queer liberalism. Such critiques are examined in detail in a second part, which analyses three art projects and performances that give rise to dissident voices and new imaginings of how asylum seekers and liberal queers can be engaged collectively in sexual politics in the UK. Challenging the cruel optimism of asylum, the analysis proposes to liberal queers to engage with LGBT asylum by looking at how their experiences differ in relation to migration, access to markets and mobility.

Alan Kidd explores the cultural sphere of amateur local historians and the associational culture of the local historical societies, from their origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries to their evolution in the twentieth. The county historical societies founded in the nineteenth-century were expressions of urban bourgeois culture and their early success owed much to that symbol of modernity, the world’s first national railway network, however, the societies exemplified the persisting social deference of ‘provincial cultural life’ expressed in the very survival of the ancient county identities. The work of nineteenth-century county historical societies contributed to an imagined notion of Englishness whose rural associations was a steadying counterpoint to a rapidly developing urban reality. The shadow of ‘amateurism’ haunted the historical societies as History developed as a university discipline, although a shift in attitudes towards the subject of local history came in the second half of the twentieth-century, chiefly in the form of ‘history from below’, exemplified by the History Workshop movement and the subsequent concepts of community history and public history.

Chapter 5 returns the focus to the social sciences. The injection of resources into Ireland’s scientific research infrastructure at the end of the 1950s created two new social science research producers – the Rural Economy Division of An Foras Taluntais and the Economic Research Institute. In the former rural sociology took a recognised place alongside a variety of other agriculture-relevant disciplines. In the latter the distinction between the economic and the social was a blurred and indistinct one. During the first half 1960s the unenclosed field of social research was to be the subject of a series of proposals from actors located within the Catholic social movement to a variety of government departments for the creation of research centres or institutes. This chapter details these proposals and the fate of consistent refusal with which they met. Empirical social research in Ireland was funded and organised in a manner that effectively excluded the participation of any Catholic social movement actor without a university base when the government approved the transformation of the Economic Research Institute into the Economic and Social Research Institute. This approval for a central social research organisation was crucially linked to the project of extending the scope of government programming to encompass social development as well as economic expansion.

Catholic sociology in Ireland changed significantly during the 1950s and 1960s. This change had four principal strands. First, the joint action of the Maynooth Professor and Muintir na Tire to secure European and US help in fostering rural sociology. Second, the use made by Archbishop McQuaid of his power within UCD to establish social science teaching in the state’s largest university. Third, the tension between useful and critical social science that emerged as the growing number of Irish Catholic immigrants in an increasingly secular Britain became a focal point for research proposals. Finally, the manner in which Ireland’s initially abundant, but later faltering, supply of religious vocations and the maximization of its clergy’s contribution to worldwide Catholic missionary efforts was studied. All of these strands are tied together by a broad turn away from exclusive preoccupation with ethical principles and towards increasing involvement in empirical social investigations.

The chapter reports on the impact of the election of Joh Morton as General Secretary on the Union and outlines developments during his years in office. Attempts to split the MU and attempts to make the Union more relevant of popular musicians are reported. The advent of commercial radio and the Union’s response to it are outlined. The 1977 Annan Report is outlined and the continuing importance of the Performing Right Tribunal stressed. Trade Unions reforms and a key Monopolies and Mergers Commission report on Collective Licensing are explained. A strike at the BBC is reported.

The author explores a three-decade transformation in the audio-visual construction of the grands ensembles, the large-scale housing projects that well before the riots of 2005 had come to typify the blighted French suburb. Analysis is based on films commissioned by the French housing ministry and on television broadcasts aired from the 1950s to the 1980s. The earliest promotional films opposed the grands ensembles to the historic working-class suburbs outlying Paris: where the latter habitat was overcrowded and unhealthy, the rationally planned modern estates promised order, comfort and hygiene. Period documentaries amplified these contrasts the better to ‘erase’ from memory the pre-modern suburb and to make cost-effective mass lodging a national cause. As early as the mid-1960s, the author notes, negative aspects of the grands ensembles – shoddy construction, poor transportation, and scant amenities – came to dominate French screens. From the early 1970s onward, the largest estates were portrayed as immigrant spaces deserted by the middle class and beset with poverty and crime. The state’s attempt to redress the suburb’s image by launching the mixed-use villes nouvelles in the 1970s and 1980s proved unsuccessful, so indelible were these images of suburban blight.