Clive Barnett

• The Open University

The COVID-19 pandemic generated debates about how pandemics should be known. There was much discussion of what role the human sciences could play in knowing – and governing – the pandemic. In this article, we focus on attempts to know the pandemic through diaries, other biographical writing, and related forms like mass photography. In particular, w...

Diaries and other materials in the Mass Observation Archive have been characterised as intersubjective and dialogic. They have been used to study top-down and bottom-up processes, including how ordinary people respond to sociological constructs and, more broadly, the footprint of social science in the 20th century. In this article, we use the Archi...

In the UK, discussion of good citizenship during the COVID‐19 pandemic largely focused on compliance and non‐compliance with government rules. In this article, we offer an alternative point of focus. Pandemic governance proceeded not only through rules/morality, but also through freedom/ethics. Good citizenship, therefore, involved practical reason...

The spatial imaginations of media studies and urban studies are increasingly aligned, illustrated by a growing literature on what can be identified as the media-urban nexus. This nexus has attracted scholarly interest not only as a cultural phenomenon, but also as a site of emergent political dynamics. We suggest that literature on the media-urban...

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously...

Authors' response to reviews of Globalising Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption (Wiley-Blackwell).

Beyond the ConsumerDoing Responsibility

The Moralization of ConsumptionJustice, Responsibility and the Politics of ConsumptionRelocating Agency in Ethical ConsumptionProblematizing Consumption

Consumer Choice and Citizenly ActsArticulating Consumption and the ConsumerMobilizing the Ethical ConsumerArticulating the Ethical ConsumerConclusion

Locating the Fair Trade ConsumerRe-evaluating Fair Trade ConsumptionManaging Fair Trade, Mobilizing NetworksDoing Fair Trade: Buying, Giving, CampaigningConclusion

The Antinomies of Consumer ChoiceTheorizing Consumption PracticesProblematizing ChoiceArticulating Background Conclusion

Justifying PracticesResearching the (Ir)responsible ConsumerVersions of ResponsibilityDilemmas of ResponsibilityConclusion

Rethinking the Spatialities of Fair TradeRe-imagining Bristol: From Slave Trade to Fair TradePutting Fair Trade in PlaceFair Trade and ‘The Politics of Place Beyond Place’Conclusion

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption presents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. *Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes. *Provides e...

This chapter traces significant interconnections between faith-motivated activists and the widening participation in fair-trade activities in and around the city of Bristol in the UK. Despite the attempts of institutionalised religion to demonstrate the contrary (see, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, 1...

This chapter traces significant interconnections between faith-motivated activists and the widening participation in fair trade activities in and around the city of Bristol in the UK.

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption presents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes. Provides emp...

The ethics of everyday consumption has become a key concern for social and environmental justice campaigning by NGOs in the United Kingdom. Schools are a prominent site for such campaigns, where, alongside other `controversial issues' and initiatives such as citizenship education, the problematisation of consumption practices has developed its own...

The emergence of an environmental movement in post-apartheid South Africa has involved the reframing of the environment as a ‘brown’ issue, articulating the discourse of social and environmental justice and a rights-based notion of democracy. Environmental movements have pursued a dual strategy of deliberation and activist opposition. Environmental...

Despite the turn to relational vocabularies in urban theory, most work on urban politics acknowledging the importance of media has tended to reproduce a centred image of ‘the media’ and a functionalist account of mediation. This essay suggests, by contrast, that media might be understood more phenomenologically, as those technologies embedded in th...

Within contemporary social theory and social science, urban and media studies are seen as zones of speciality, with distinctive theoretical traditions and substantive concerns. This introduction situates the four short essays making up this Debates and Developments section in relation to a recent interdisciplinary workshop held in June 2008 at The...

This paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn...

This paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn...

Initial assessments of the potential for organic food systems have offered an optimistic interpretation of the progressive political and ethical characteristics involved. This positive gloss has prompted a stream of critique emphasising the need to explore the ambiguities and disconnections inherent therein. In this paper, we consider the case of R...

The organisation of this workshop has been prompted by concerns with the way media so often seem to get left out of writing on cities and urban politics (rather than vice-versa). We agree with Iveson’s (2007) argument that urban and media studies have much more in the way of shared concerns when it comes to politics than is conventionally thought t...

This paper develops a relational understanding of the geographies of citizenship action, using the example of environmental activism in Durban as an empirical reference point. We argue that citizenship involves an interactive dynamic shaped by different actors’ capacities to project authority and influence over distance by enacting different modali...

This article situates the analysis of fair-trade consumption in the context of debates about civic activism and political participation. It argues that fair-trade consumption should be understood as a political phenomenon, which, through the mediating action of organizations and campaigns, makes claims on states, corporations, and institutions. Thi...

Drawing on recent political theory that examines the relationship between inclusive deliberation and oppositional activism in processes of democratisation, we develop a case study of environmental justice mobilisation in post-apartheid South Africa. We focus on the emergence of a network of social movement organisations embedded in particular local...

About the book: Governance, Consumers and Citizens is the first book to bring together a study of governance with consumption, examining the changing place of the consumer as citizen in recent trends in governance, the tensions between competing ideas and practices of consumerism and the active role consumers play in the construction and practice o...

Understandings of fairtrade, ethical trading and sustainability often assume a relationship involving disparate placeless consumers being stitched together with place‐specific producers in developing world contexts. Using an ethnographic study of the policy‐making and political processes of the Bristol Fairtrade City campaign, we suggest ways in wh...

Consumerism is often held to be inimical to collective deliberation and decision-making of the sort required to address pressing environmental, humanitarian and global justice issues. Policy interventions and academic discourse alike often assume that transforming consumption practices requires interventions that address people as consumers. This p...

In an historically unprecedented way, democracy is now increasingly seen as a universal model of legitimate rule.This work addresses the key question: How can democracy be understood in theory and in practise? In three thematically organised sections, Spaces of Democracy uses a critical geographical imagination (informed by thinking on space, place...

This article draws on research into the development and growth of ethical consumption in the UK to suggest why consumerism and citizenship are not necessarily opposed practices. Consumer-oriented activism offers important pathways to political participation for ordinary people. The organisations involved in this field embed consumer-oriented activi...

Geography’s debates about how to maintain a sense of morally responsible action often emphasise the problematic nature of caring at a distance, and take for granted particular kinds of moral selfhood in which responsibility is bound into notions of human agency that emphasise knowledge and recognition. Taking commodity consumption as a field in whi...

Globalisation has become an almost ubiquitous term in academic debates, policy circles, and popular culture. In this paper we critically consider geography's characteristic form of engagement with the multifaceted features of globalisation discourses and realities. Globalisation provides an entry point for assertions of the conceptual and empirical...