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Resist the Punitive State

Resist the Punitive State

Grassroots Struggles Across Welfare, Housing, Education and Prisons

Edited by Emily Luise Hart, Joe Greener and Rich Moth

What do we do when housing, mental health, disability, prisons and immigration policy become synonymous with state violence?
To examine government policy and state practice on housing, welfare, mental health, disability, prisons or immigration is to come face-to-face with the harsh realities of the 'punitive state'.

But state violence and corporate harm always meet with resistance. With contributions from a wide range of activists and scholars, Resist the Punitive State highlights and theorises the front line of resistance movements actively opposing the state-corporate nexus. The chapters engage with different strategies of resistance in a variety of movements and campaigns. In doing so the book considers what we can learn from involvement in grassroots struggles, and contributes to contemporary debates around the role and significance of subversive knowledge and engaged scholarship in activism.

Aimed at activists and campaigners plus students, researchers and educators in criminology, social policy, sociology, social work and the social sciences more broadly, Resist the Punitive State not only presents critiques of a range of harmful state-corporate policy agendas but situates these in the context of social movement struggles fighting for political transformation and alternative futures.

Emily Luise Hart is a Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University. Her research takes a critical and abolitionist approach to the study of prisons; women offenders; forms of prisoner resistance and desistance from crime. She is co-editor of New Perspectives on Desistance: Theoretical and Empirical Developments (Palgrave, 2017) and is a campaigner for Community Action on Prison Expansion (CAPE) and a Trade Union activist.

Joe Greener is Lecturer in Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool in Singapore. Joe has been an active campaigner in several anti-austerity campaigns in Liverpool. His research interests broadly address critical perspectives on welfare policy and criminology in Singapore and the United Kingdom. More specifically, recent research has focused on the social care crisis, prisons and the impact of privatisation.

Rich Moth is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Liverpool Hope University. Rich has been involved in a number of mental health, welfare and anti-austerity campaigns over recent years, and is a member of the national steering committee of activist group the Social Work Action Network (SWAN). He is author of Understanding Mental Distress: Knowledge and Practice in Neoliberal Mental Health Services (Policy Press, 2019), and an Associate Editor of Critical and Radical Social Work journal.

Acknowledgements
Introduction - Rich Moth, Emily Luise Hart and Joe Greener
PART I: CHALLENGING STATE–CORPORATE POWER: THEORIES AND STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE
1. Resisting the Punitive State–Corporate Nexus: Activist Strategy and the Integrative Transitional Approach - Joe Greener, Emily Luise Hart and Rich Moth
2. Prefigurative Politics as Resistance to State–Corporate Harm: Fighting Gentrification in Post-Occupy New York City - Laura Naegler
3. Struggles Inside and Outside the University - Steve Tombs and David Whyte
PART II: RESISTING THE PUNITIVE WELFARE STATE: HOUSING, MENTAL HEALTH, DISABILITY AND IMMIGRATION
4. Class, Politics and Locality in the London Housing Movement - Lisa Mckenzie
5. Mad Studies: Campaigning Against the Psychiatric System and Welfare ‘Reform’ and for Something Better - Peter Beresford
6. Challenging Neoliberal Housing in the Shadow of Grenfell - Glyn Robbins
7. The Disabled People’s Movement in the Age of Austerity: Rights, Resistance and Reclamation - Bob Williams-Findlay
8. The ‘Hostile Environment’ for Immigrants: The Windrush Scandal and Resistance - Ken Olende
PART III: SUBVERSIVE KNOWLEDGE AND RESISTANCE: RECONCEPTUALISING CRIMINALISATION, PENALITY AND VIOLENCE
9. Resisting the Surveillance State: Deviant Knowledge and Undercover Policing - Raphael Schlembach
10. Ordinary Rebels, Everyone: Abolitionist Activist Scholars and the Mega Prisons - David Scott
11. Re-Imagining an End to Gendered Violence: Prefiguring the Worlds We Want - Julia Downes
12. Challenging Prevent: Building Resistance to Institutional Islamophobia and the Attack on Civil Liberties - Robert Ferguson
Notes on Contributors
Index

Published by Pluto Press in Nov 2019
Paperback ISBN: 9780745339511
eBook ISBN: 9781786805300

135mm x 215mm