Governing the International Family

by Ala Sirriyeh, Lecturer in Sociology

A few days after Valentine’s Day, I stood in the supermarket queue contemplating who might be so confident as to buy a reduced priced Valentine's Day card from the display for next year. Coming straight after Christmas and New Year, some people find themselves faced with a gauntlet of public celebrations that centre heavily on the themes of family and love. Even if they share my sentiments on such over-commercialised, over-sentimentalised events, it must be difficult for those who have to endure these days while living apart from their partner or family. While a number of people do, to some extent, choose to engage in living-apart-together (LAT) relationships, for others separation is of a more enforced nature. This is currently the situation facing a number of British citizens and residents who are in a relationship with a partner from a non-EEA country (European Economic Area).

On the 9th of July 2012 the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government's new family migration rules came into force. These new rules introduced a steep rise in the minimum income threshold for UK citizens and residents who are seeking to sponsor their (non-EEA national) partners and children to join them in the UK for family formation or family reunification. Until the new rules came into force British citizens and residents who were settled permanently in the UK and were sponsoring family members to join them were required to show that they had an income that was equivalent to the level of Income Support that a family of that size would receive in the UK. This would demonstrate that the sponsor could provide for these dependents who would not have recourse to public funds. Building on existing conditionalities for family formation and family reunification migration, the 2012 family migration rules impose further conditionalities including, in particular, a sharp increase in the minimum income threshold levels from the previous level of £5,500 per annum to a new minimum level of £18, 600 per annum. This threshold rises further according to the number of dependents being sponsored with an additional income of £3,800 for the first child and an additional £2,400 for each further child. This means that the UK now has one of the highest minimum income thresholds (second only to Norway). Unlike many other countries, in the UK this income must be gained from the employment of the sponsoring partner in the UK and cannot include benefits, property assets, the foreign partner's overseas income, subsidies from a third party or loans.

The new rules have attracted sustained criticism over the past year and a half from those families who have been affected by these changes and their supporters, and the rules have recently been the subject of an inquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Migration. The APPG observed that in 2012 47 per cent of the UK's working population would not have qualified to sponsor a non-EEA partner to join them in the UK. Some minority ethnic populations, those living outside London, young people and women are disproportionately affected. Family migration and, in particular 'marriage migration' has long been a policy theme through which anxieties around ethnicity, identity and ‘integration’ are channelled. However, the new family migration rules indicate that class is now more explicitly weaved into the picture (although it has always to some extent been a significant factor in its intersections with ethnicity).  It is not simply the immigration of particular ethnic groups or nationalities that is restricted, controlled or discouraged. The changes introduced by the new family migration rules also throw into question the citizenship status and inclusion of some British nationals, including white British citizens as well as those minority ethnic citizen populations who have long been a focus of such debates. In addition to ethnicity and nationality, the hierarchical organisation of acceptable and less acceptable international partnerships and family reflects class-based inequalities and a connected moralising discourse about valued family life.

Keele Postgraduate Research Forum

by Andrew Henley, PhD candidate in Criminology

Next Tuesday (4th February) sees the launch of a new student-organised forum for postgraduate researchers across the social sciences at Keele University.  The forum provides an opportunity for PGR students to present, 'test out' and receive feedback on their work in an informal, supportive and stress-free environment. It will be held each Tuesday between 12 and 1pm in the Claus Moser building (CM1.24).

The following list of speakers has been confirmed up until the Easter break:

4th February – Kasper Larsen ‘Tracking positional change in the Bali Process: NGO cohesion on mitigation‘.

11th February - Adam Duell ‘Dramatis non-persona: Local Enterprise Partnerships, (in)visibility and urban governance’.

18th February – Allan Arturo Gonzalez Estrada ‘Intentionality and phenomenal experience: research in the philosophy of mind‘

25th February – Siti Ismail ‘Malaysia Party System 2004-13: Continuity and Change‘

4th March – Rob Emerton ‘Tiananmen: The Problem of Representation and the Event’

11th March – Maria Wain ‘The Internet Generation: Youth and Technology‘

18th March – Keely Hughes ‘Philosophical Praxis to Utilitarian Consumption: Sites for Creating an Education Utopia‘.

25th March – Ian Mahoney ‘Resisting Abjection:  Crime and deviance as a response to the abject politics of contemporary Britain‘ AND Andrew Henley ’Criminal stigma: the oil on the ‘revolving doors’ and the need for an ‘abolitionist doorstop’.

1st April – Giulia Mininni ‘Gender and energy issues in the Global South‘.

For abstracts on upcoming papers and information on participating, a new blog has been set up to accompany the forum.

Social and Political Critique in the Age of Austerity - places available for participants

We have a small number of places available for participants at this all-day workshop.  This will be held at Keele University, on Wednesday 12th February.  Email Emma Head (e.l.head@keele.ac.uk) as soon as possible if you could like a place. The programme follows: 

9.45-10.00 Welcome and introduction

10.00-11.15 Panel one

‘Occupy Hong Kong: experiments with the citizen-assemblage in the heart of capitalist utopia’

Paul-Francois Tremlett, Lecturer in Religious Studies, The Open University

‘Changing society? Proper politics, post-politics and Occupy London’

Sam Burgum, PhD candidate, University of Warwick

‘The impossibility of the future: empty futures and the problem of critique in times of austerity’,

Dr Chris Till, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences, Leeds Metropolitan University

11.15-11.30 Refreshments

11.30-12.45 Panel two

‘Disciplining the reserve labour army: the reality behind the rhetoric in the UK government’s work programme’

John David Jordan, PhD student, Manchester Metropolitan University

‘From lifeboat immigration politics to dry land: Cities of Sanctuary in an age of austerity’

Dr Ala Sirriyeh, Lecturer in Sociology, Keele University

‘Scapegoating during a time of crisis: a critique of post ‘Celtic tiger’ Ireland'

 Dr. Lee F. Monaghan, Michael O’Flynn, and Martin Power, University of Limerick

  

12.45-1.30 Lunch

 1.30-2.45 Panel three

‘Anti-capitalist resistance in the liberalist context’

Daniel Fletcher, PhD candidate, Keele University

‘The rise of the network labour movement’

Alex Wood, PhD candidate, Cambridge University

'From 1968 to 2008 and beyond: lessons for transformative social movements?'
Bryn Jones, Senior Teaching Fellow in Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath

2.45-3.00 Refreshments 
3.00-4.00 Panel four
'Strikers, communists, tramps, and detectives'... the class, the party, and the state'. 
Professor Roger Seifert, Department of Human Resources, University of Wolverhampton

'Post-citizenship and the democratic imagination'
Dr Nick Stevenson, Reader, Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham

4.15-6.00 Professor Costas Douzinas, Birkbeck University 

The Banality of Good

By

Mark Featherstone

Following a recent discussion about the relationship between violence and education with a colleague in Canada, I was struck by the potential application of Hannah Arendt’s idea, the banality of evil, to contemporary society. Arendt was a German-American political theorist who wrote famous books, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and later, Eichmann in Jerusalem, on Nazism and the Holocaust. In the latter book she details her response to the trial of the Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, who effectively oversaw the horrors of the Holocaust. For Arendt, Eichmann confounded expectations. One would imagine that the bureaucrat behind the Holocaust would have to be a monster, a sadist, a being of pure evil, but in Arendt’s eyes, there was nothing particularly unusual about Eichmann. He was a committed family man, who was simply doing his job. Thus we approach the meaning of the term, the banality of evil. Evil does not have to be exceptional – it can take place in the mundane, in meetings, perfectly civilized conversations, and the signing of pieces of paper. Of course, there is nothing in the psychoanalytic theory of sadism that requires the sadist to be a blood thirsty monster. For Freud, and later writers on this condition, sadism is in a way always banal. In psychoanalysis the sadist is a deeply damaged person who seeks to compensate for their own destroyed self through violence against others who are reduced to the status of objects. For Klaus Theweleit, who wrote perhaps the classic work on Nazi psychology, this is exactly how the Nazi mind-set evolved. As a result of shifts taking place across Europe at the time, and the pain and humiliation caused by the loss of World War I, Germany evolved a generation of wounded men who tended towards sadistic over-compensation. In other words, they made up for their own weaknesses by attacking others who they reduced to the status of objects to be destroyed. Most importantly, there is not necessarily any blood lust in any of this – since the sadist transforms other people into objects, there is no need to tear them apart in a violent rage, but rather punish them, and destroy them methodically.

In light of this theory, my response to debates about the exceptional nature of the Holocaust has always been to say that although the scale of the murder which took place in the camps was exceptional, the horror which was inflicted upon particular individuals was not. Stalin similarly developed a network of camps across the Soviet Union. In recent days, camps have been discovered in Syria. The concentration camp itself was a British invention of the Boer War in the late 19th-early 20th century. Although it is true to say that no other regime has ever designed camps specifically to wipe out entire populations of people in the way that the Nazis did, the point remains that sadistic violence occurs on a daily basis across the world. How many children are brutally abused and killed across the world every day? In acknowledging this, one does not demean the violence of the Holocaust, but similarly in acknowledging the horror of camps, one must not demean the violence which is inflicted upon a solitary individual who suffers in silence in some lost part of the world. In many respects I think that this is what Arendt saw in Eichmann – violence, destruction, and sadism is normal, never exceptional, and takes place everywhere. Eichmann was the embodiment of this – the evil man who was simply that, a man, who could not even dignify his acts by being the some superhuman evil demon. Again, this is not to deny the extremism of the Holocaust, or the extremism of violence which is inflicted upon any individual, but rather to say that this extremism is largely normal in a world where people brutalise each other on a daily basis in the name of power, control, and money. In my own work over the last couple of years I have sought to explore this everyday sadism through reference to Henry Giroux’s notion of the culture of cruelty. The purpose of my use of this theory was to show that the violence and horror of episodes such as the Holocaust has been repeated across history in places such as Bosnia and today Syria and can be traced back to a particular psychopathology which we can also find played out in everyday situations. In other words, the kind of violence we find in macro, world historical cases, is similarly operative in micro cases, where individuals destroy each other in the name of power. Thus the next move in my work was to seek out instances of this violence in banal situations so that it was possible to reverse Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil in a new formulation where evil is in the banal which forms a kind of ambience or background violence that sustains more extreme forms of violence and destruction. Here, my point is that because we are largely insensitive to the evil of the banal, it is easy for us to take the next step and find ourselves exposed to extreme violence, where adjustment may or may not be an option depending on prevailing cultural attitudes. This is, of course, exactly what happened in Nazi Germany, where debate concerns exactly how much the average German knew about the camps. Why would they not rebel? Why would they not resist? The answer to this is that they occupied a position where extremism had become normal. Under these conditions it would have been extreme to stand up and resist evil by being good.

Extending this thesis, the purpose of my current work on education and violence is to seek to apply this theory to schooling and particularly an exploration of the violence that is often found in schools. After setting up a psycho-social theory of power, sadism, and bullying in childhood, I shift my attention to an exploration of extreme cases, Columbine and Sandy Hook, and suggest that we should locate these events in a cultural context, American capitalism, where violence, has become banal, ordinary, normal. In reading Lionel Shriver’s book, We Need to Talk about Kevin, against the works of the child psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott, I argue that extreme violence in school is a result of an expansion of the ambient violence, what we might call ambient evil, of wider society itself, which prevents the delivery of the kind of care and attention that children need in order to grow into adults who can care and have empathy for others. Under these conditions, I argue that it is worth thinking about another reversal of Arendt’s idea – the banality of good. Here, very basic acts of goodness become extreme forms of rebellion against a cultural norm organised around opposition, competition, violence, and evil. Thus, goodness becomes a form extremism, even in its smallest, most banal, expressions. It is through this idea that I try to develop an ethics of everyday resistance to normal violence – that is through the idea of the banal act of goodness that contains a kind of exceptional, or extremist, resistance to the norm which is to try to dominate other people. While the philosopher Immanuel Kant set up the idea of categorical imperative, where I should do good for the sake of doing good and not seek out any external rewards for being good, I think that it is necessary to supplement or gloss this by saying that what this means is that is we should try to be good, understand other people, and act in ways which defend their humanity, even when our cultural context would suggest that we should do the opposite and fall back into the normality of sadism where the other is somebody to over-power, objectify, and destroy, either metaphorically or literally.