Visual tropes of movement and passage in French films of the 1920s and 1930s qualify the suburb as a locus of temporary release from the constraints of authority, industrialization and modernity as well as from an unmoving rural past. Suburban roadways and waterways allow world-weary individuals momentarily to reinvent themselves. Commenting on films by Jean Renoir (La Fille de l’eau, 1924; La Nuit du carrefour, 1932), Jean Epstein (La Glace à trois faces, 1927) and Marcel Carné (Nogent, el Dorado du dimanche, 1929), the author highlights moments of phenomenological discovery and psychological negotiation. Where the canals showcased in Jean Vigo’s poetic realist L’Atalante, classified in its time as a river barge film, allow for progressive self-discovery, motorways and the attendant car culture of the interwar period reflect in other titles an ‘accelerating transformation of the world’. Tropes of euphoric mobility and freedom would lose their force by the close of the 1930s, when the mood sours and the suburb turns dark.

This chapter explores how policies and practices of disaster recovery frame the emergency as ongoing and dangerous, in subsequent months and years, through its disruption of urban architecture and its lingering presence in memory. Death is understood to live on, hidden within human memory, with destabilising effects for politics. Efforts to consolidate recovery use techniques which act upon trauma (such as counselling) and which efface the memory of death inherent within destroyed landscapes (such as memorialisation). This chapter argues that memorialisation is a security practice, contra mortality. The empirical focus of the chapter is the World Trade Center in Manhattan, where the Reflecting Absence memorial has been constructed to simulate disaster recovery and the mitigating of death on the site of 9/11.

US: A long struggle by a small group of politicians and journalists over a decade led to numerous abortive attempts to pass legislation in the 1960s. The bill finally became the 1966 FOI Act following a long process of negotiation in the Senate and opposition, though crucially not rejection, from the then President Lyndon Johnson (Reylea 1983: Yu and Davies 2012).Australia: the Australian FOI policy development, beginning in the 1970s and ending in 1982, was a long series of advances and retreats. The proposed legislation was alternatively weakened during its passage, with crusaders both in government and in the Senate seeking to preserve key features against bureaucratic and political opposition (Snell 2001: Terrill 1998).India: the traditional view of Indian Right to Information Act is of a remarkable grassroots alliance of dedicated reformers pushed openness legislation from the local level upwards during the 1990s and 2000s (Roberts 2006: Sharma 2013). However the reality is more complex as RTI was the result of a combination of piecemeal reforms in the 1980s, shifts in elite power and support from parts of the bureaucracy and from Sonia Ghandi herself (Singh 2007: Sharma 2013).

This chapter outlines the history of musicians’ representative organisations before the formation of the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union in 1893. It traces developments from the fourteenth century to the late nineteenth, examining the various fraternities, brotherhood guilds and societies which were formed. Issues of protectionism, benevolence and organisation are raised. The moves towards a re trade unionism are outlined in the context of the growth of new unionism. The formation of the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union (AMU) and thee rival London Orchestral Association (LOA) are outlined.

This chapter foregrounds my approach to ethics as a ‘new’ ethnographic object. I show how an attentive ethnographic sensibility can uncover forms of interpersonal relationality, which diverge from a politics of interminable opposition. Learning from Veena Das’ work, I turn away from the most visible campus ‘events’ and toward a seemingly mundane student meeting in order to address the following question: how, in a politically polarised context, do friendships and alternative sociabilities become possible? I offer an ethnographic account of a small scale gathering of students involved in an ‘Israel-Palestine Forum’ at Redbrick University. Tracing the interpersonal and institutional conditions of this meeting, I show how its participants cultivated practices of speaking and listening, which enabled us to engage with each other as uncertain, ambivalent and fragmented subjects. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ethics of ‘parrhesia’ and Stanley Cavell’s insights into the pedagogic dimensions of democratic relationships, I explore how risk-taking, trust and singular friendships enabled the tragic histories of Palestine-Israel to be spoken and reflected upon. The chapter concludes with some comparative insights in relation to my three fieldsites, highlighting how the differential impacts of socio-economic changes to higher education can limit these democratic possibilities within campuses.

Interpreting security as the effacement of mortality enables us to dramatically broaden the scope of research to include non-anticipatory temporalities of security. In this chapter, present-tense emergency management is exposed as a technique of mortality effacement. States efface the trauma of mortality and re-establish security by performing the rituals of emergency management: erecting cordons, organising the triage of bodies, and reconciling bodies with their previous living identities (‘disaster victim identification’). Disaster response is a reconstitutive performance of security and sovereignty against the incursion of death and trauma.

The author addresses the spatial determinations at play in Georges Franju’s French horror masterpiece Les Yeux sans visage (1960), in which a mad scientist bent on reconstructing his daughter’s damaged face tortures and kills the unsuspecting young women he lures to his suburban villa. The author argues for a strong correlation between Franju’s directorial sensibility and the Paris suburbs’ culturally and geographically peripheral status. A locus of untold violence, Dr Génissier’s secluded villa cloaks the extraordinary under the guise of the ordinary to unsettle the film audience in a strong rejection of the nostalgic tones of Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or and of Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle from the same period. The author relates themes of banishment and disfiguration to the sociological effects of suburban upheaval during the Trente Glorieuses. The story of Dr Génissier’s experiments gone awry – ultimately a story about the duality of victimhood and predatory madness – comes symptomatically to express other social processes at work in French culture of the period.

This chapter looks at the theory of citizenship through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the practice and definition of multi-ethnic and multicultural citizenship in both Britain and France, especially in regard to postcolonial migrants and their children.

This chapter looks at two countries that offer deviant cases-one where the legislation was passed through a consensual process and one where it was ‘imposed’ upon a new government by its predecessor.The Consensus Model in New Zealand: agreement between senior politicians and officials led to a consensual process around developing policy, driven by those who, elsewhere, frequently formed the core resistance to the process (White 2007; Snell 2001). This led to a step-by-step, conciliatory process and a dynamic and flexible law, frequently judged one of the strongest in the world (White 2007; Aitken 1998).The Imposed Model in Ireland: a series of controversial court cases and a scandal over infected beef in 1990s placed FOI on the agenda of two successive reformist governments. In 1997 legislation was passed as a ‘legacy’ policy in the dying days of a government which was then replaced with a successor deeply sceptical of FOI (Kearney and Stapleton 1998). The process meant FOI became a contentious and controversial issue from its inception (Felle and Adshead 2008). This represents another reason for FOI being passed, seen also in South America, whereby legislation is fostered upon a government as a legacy issue (Michener 2010).

This chapter begins by asking how sociology can respond to the abnormal and tragic transnational politics of Palestine-Israel. I discuss how my ethnographic approach challenges the violent abstractions of dominant political theories and offers a distinctive contribution to the field of the ‘anthropology of ethics’. I then address a series of questions arising from my research into campus struggles around Palestine-Israel. First, what social conditions enable ethical modes of relationality to develop between student activists? Second, how can a sense of ethical relations as responsive to the singularity and uncertainty of ‘the other’ come into tension with the political expression of moral commitment and coherent action? And how can more complex, localised ethico-political responses be scaled up to the level of more broadly mediated communications, in which reductionist, symbolic representations flourish? Grounding my responses to these questions in an ethnographic vignette, I show how an easily overlooked interpersonal encounter carries the potential to transfigure the seemingly intractable tensions between ‘free speech’, ‘good relations’ and ‘political activism’ within universities. In this way, this book concludes with an - at once - philosophical and ethnographic response to the continued presence of the Palestine-Israel conflict within British campuses.

Alistair Mutch examines administrative practices in eighteenth century rural parishes, using the evidence of churchwardens’ records from the Deanery of Bingham, Nottinghamshire, complemented by details of parish life from contemporary diaries. Churchwardens were part of the ‘middling sort’, elite parish office holders whose freedom in devising their own administrative practices meant patterns of accountability often varied considerably between parishes. These practices depended much on the personal character of the office holder, whose degree of local autonomy reproduced a very ‘Anglican form of authority’. Churchwardens’ stewardship of money and conduct of accounts meetings had a personal, sociable dimension which contrasted with the rigorous, disciplined ‘forms of accountability’ associated with kirk sessions in Scotland during the same period, and these distinctive patterns of administrative order deserve greater attention, because of their potential to offer new perspectives on emerging notions of national identity and difference.

The transformations which took place in the urban environment during the Victorian period gave the public space of towns and cities new meanings, and Terry Wyke’s essay on Sir Robert Peel, examines how political lives and reputations were shaped by the commemorative culture of public portrait statues and busts. Peel's death in 1850 and his subsequent memorializatiom marked the start of a significant trend in public life, expressed in the commissioning of outdoor portrait statues to celebrate prominent local and national figures. Peel's image, 'forged' by the contemporary press, was absorbed by a broader Liberal bourgeois narrative in cities like Manchester, as a public statement of the reputation and achievements of the Anti-Corn Law League, with which Peel was so strongly associated. Such portraiture, replete with political symbolism, played an important part in defining a new civic landscape in the Victorian period, a material narrative of political life that had been largely forgotten by the second half of the twentieth century, although it remains a rich source of evidence deserving of greater attention.

This chapter covers the period from the election of General Scard as General Secretary through to his replacement by Derek Kay and the internal machinations which ended with John Smith being elected General Secretary in 2002. Reorganisation of the UK’s orchestras is reported. Internal restructuring of the Union is noted and problems around the 2000 election for General Secretary are reported.

Melanie Tebbutt’s essay traces some of the changes which transformed working-class culture after the Second World War through an analysis of the personal advice pages of teenage magazines, an important expression of girls’ culture between the mid-1950s and late-1970s. Tebbutt takes as her subject Mirabelle magazine, widely read by girls in this period, although its popularity has been largely over-shadowed by the most popular teenage magazine of the time, which was Jackie. Advice pages in teenage magazines from the 1950s and 1960s have received less attention that those of the later decades of the twentieth-century and Tebbutt traces the changes which took place in queries and answers, from the time of Mirabelle’s publication, in 1956, when its advice column was identified with a marriage bureau in central Manchester, to ceasing production in 1977, by which time discussion of sexual matters, including pregnancy outside marriage, had become more open. Magazines aimed at the teenage market were an important source of sexual information for young people and this essay offers a nuanced analysis of Mirabelle’s advice pages which suggests there is considerable scope for comparative studies.

This chapter develops the analysis of the relationship between death and security for the era of resilience policy. Instead of promising that a stable and impermeable lifeworld can be maintained through security barriers, resilience reframes security around the inevitability of disaster events. The promise made by security officials to the public is no longer exclusively made in terms of prevention, but also through the prospect of resilient recovery after the crisis: death has made its way inside the performance of security. Despite the shift away from the prophylactic model of security, the chapter argues that resilient security practices still function to mitigate anxiety associated with mortality.