Rowland Atkinson and Sarah Blandy
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784995300
- eISBN:
- 9781526121035
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784995300.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
Domestic Fortress offers a critical analysis of the contemporary home and its close relationship to fear and security. It considers the important connection between the private home, political life ...
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Domestic Fortress offers a critical analysis of the contemporary home and its close relationship to fear and security. It considers the important connection between the private home, political life and the economy that we term tessellated neoliberalism. The book considers the nucleus of the domestic home as part of a much larger archipelago frontline of homes and gated communities that appear as a new home front set against diverse sources of social anxiety. These range from questions of invasion (such as burglary or identity theft) to those of security (the home as a financial resource in retirement and as a place of refuge in an unpredictable world). A culture of fear has been responded to through increasingly emphatic retreats by homeowners into fortified dwellings, palatial houses, concealed bunker pads and gated developments. Many feature elaborate security measures; alarms, CCTV systems, motion-sensing lights and impregnable panic rooms. Domestic Fortresslocates the anxieties driving these responses to the corporate and political manufacturing of fear, the triumph of neoliberal models of homeownership and related modes of social individualisation and risk that permeate society today. Domestic Fortress draws on perspectives and research from criminology, urban studies and sociology to offer a sense of the private home as a site of wavering anxiety and security, exclusion and warmth, alongside dreams of retreat and autonomy that mesh closely with the defining principles of neoliberal governance.
Even as the home is acknowledged to play a vital role in sheltering us from the elements so it has now come to be a locus around which many anxieties are shut-out. The home allows us to lock out the daily hardships of life, but is also a site from which we witness a wide range of troubling phenomena: the insecurities of the workplace, plans for our future welfare, internationalized terror, geo-political warfare, ecological catastrophes, feelings of loss and uncertainty around identity, to say nothing of the daily risks of flood, fire and other disasters.
The home now plays a complex dual role that slips between offering us protection from these worries while also offering the nightmare of its own possible invasion, erosion or destruction. On top of these concerns entire industries have been built that sell a war against strangers, dirt and disaster. This of course includes the insurance industry itself, but also the use of technologies that both protect the home and make it effectively more impregnable to casual social contact as well as the proliferation of products devoted to domestic cleanliness. Domestic Fortress considers the fantasies and realities of dangers to the contemporary home and its inhabitants and details the wide range of actions taken in the pursuit of total safety.Less
Domestic Fortress offers a critical analysis of the contemporary home and its close relationship to fear and security. It considers the important connection between the private home, political life and the economy that we term tessellated neoliberalism. The book considers the nucleus of the domestic home as part of a much larger archipelago frontline of homes and gated communities that appear as a new home front set against diverse sources of social anxiety. These range from questions of invasion (such as burglary or identity theft) to those of security (the home as a financial resource in retirement and as a place of refuge in an unpredictable world). A culture of fear has been responded to through increasingly emphatic retreats by homeowners into fortified dwellings, palatial houses, concealed bunker pads and gated developments. Many feature elaborate security measures; alarms, CCTV systems, motion-sensing lights and impregnable panic rooms. Domestic Fortresslocates the anxieties driving these responses to the corporate and political manufacturing of fear, the triumph of neoliberal models of homeownership and related modes of social individualisation and risk that permeate society today. Domestic Fortress draws on perspectives and research from criminology, urban studies and sociology to offer a sense of the private home as a site of wavering anxiety and security, exclusion and warmth, alongside dreams of retreat and autonomy that mesh closely with the defining principles of neoliberal governance.
Even as the home is acknowledged to play a vital role in sheltering us from the elements so it has now come to be a locus around which many anxieties are shut-out. The home allows us to lock out the daily hardships of life, but is also a site from which we witness a wide range of troubling phenomena: the insecurities of the workplace, plans for our future welfare, internationalized terror, geo-political warfare, ecological catastrophes, feelings of loss and uncertainty around identity, to say nothing of the daily risks of flood, fire and other disasters.
The home now plays a complex dual role that slips between offering us protection from these worries while also offering the nightmare of its own possible invasion, erosion or destruction. On top of these concerns entire industries have been built that sell a war against strangers, dirt and disaster. This of course includes the insurance industry itself, but also the use of technologies that both protect the home and make it effectively more impregnable to casual social contact as well as the proliferation of products devoted to domestic cleanliness. Domestic Fortress considers the fantasies and realities of dangers to the contemporary home and its inhabitants and details the wide range of actions taken in the pursuit of total safety.
Camilla Lewis and Jessica Symons (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526100733
- eISBN:
- 9781526132376
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526100733.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
This book demonstrates how a city is constituted in the productive tension between making and realising, between directing activity and allowing for its emergence. It presents nine ethnographic ...
More
This book demonstrates how a city is constituted in the productive tension between making and realising, between directing activity and allowing for its emergence. It presents nine ethnographic accounts across Manchester UK, including residential neighbourhoods, cultural events, public spaces, the council, areas of urban regeneration and the airport. The authors examine the dynamics of power for those developing the city, experiencing such interventions and the spaces in-between. These perspectives trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant post-industrial city, showing how people’s decisions and actions co-produce the city and give it shape. The ethnographic accounts focus on issues including self-policing (Smith), loss and de-industrialisation (Lewis), disenfranchised football fans, (Poulton), sexuality and public space (Atkins), nurturing an emergent city (Symons), defining the commons in public spaces (Lang), conflicting futures thinking (Pieri) networked urban governance (Knox), and how airport design shapes behaviour (O’Doherty). Their specificity provides grounded contexts for identifying ideological patterns and structural processes. They demonstrate the potential of ethnographies to beyond the particular. In doing so, the contributors complicate the dominant narrative of Manchester’s renaissance as an entrepreneurial city. The Afterword argues that even though a city’s future may be planned, it does not materialise as the perfect representation of its blueprint drawings, strategies or vision documents. Instead it is realised through the accumulative efforts of all those who live and work in the city. Researchers of cities can undertake a similar distributed analysis, attending to the unexpected insights that emerge through an open and discursive ethnographic process.Less
This book demonstrates how a city is constituted in the productive tension between making and realising, between directing activity and allowing for its emergence. It presents nine ethnographic accounts across Manchester UK, including residential neighbourhoods, cultural events, public spaces, the council, areas of urban regeneration and the airport. The authors examine the dynamics of power for those developing the city, experiencing such interventions and the spaces in-between. These perspectives trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant post-industrial city, showing how people’s decisions and actions co-produce the city and give it shape. The ethnographic accounts focus on issues including self-policing (Smith), loss and de-industrialisation (Lewis), disenfranchised football fans, (Poulton), sexuality and public space (Atkins), nurturing an emergent city (Symons), defining the commons in public spaces (Lang), conflicting futures thinking (Pieri) networked urban governance (Knox), and how airport design shapes behaviour (O’Doherty). Their specificity provides grounded contexts for identifying ideological patterns and structural processes. They demonstrate the potential of ethnographies to beyond the particular. In doing so, the contributors complicate the dominant narrative of Manchester’s renaissance as an entrepreneurial city. The Afterword argues that even though a city’s future may be planned, it does not materialise as the perfect representation of its blueprint drawings, strategies or vision documents. Instead it is realised through the accumulative efforts of all those who live and work in the city. Researchers of cities can undertake a similar distributed analysis, attending to the unexpected insights that emerge through an open and discursive ethnographic process.
