Western culture has ‘faith’ in the labour market as a test of the worth of each individual. For those who are out of work, welfare is now less of a support than a means of purification and redemption. Continuously reformed by the left and right in politics, the contemporary welfare state attempts to transform the unemployed into active jobseekers, punishing non-compliance.Drawing on ideas from economic theology, this provocative book uncovers deep-rooted religious concepts and show...

Far from being the preserve of a few elite thinkers, critique increasingly dominates public life in modernity, leading to a cacophony of accusation and denunciation around all political issues. The technique of unmasking ‘power’ or ‘hegemony’ or ‘ideology’ has now been adopted across the political spectrum, where critical discourses are routinely used to suggest that anything and everything is only a ‘construct’ or even a ‘conspiracy’. This book draws on anthropological theory to provide a...

Defining the principles and practices of walking as critical pedagogy, this book engages with social questions and challenges related to understandings of the Anthropocene.Through a series of chapters that operationalize walking as a form of participatory pedagogy, it explores issues including migration and borders, sustainability and climate change, gender and feminist thought, the labour market, crime and rehabilitation, and urban life and regeneration. Showing how walking enable...

The sociology of unemployment is an analysis of the experience and governance of unemployment. By considering unemployment as more than just the absence of work; the book explores unemployment as a distinctive experience created by the welfare state.Each chapter explores an aspect of the experience or governance of unemployment; beginning with how people talk about their experience of being unemployed individually and collectively, to the places of unemployment, and on to the proce...