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Historians have noted that the chief characteristic of nineteenth-century British society was its structural inequality, with estimates of the proportion of the population who belonged to the ‘working classes’ ranging from 75% to 95%,1 reflecting a life of income and food precarity as well as limited access to education and occupational choice. Not surprisingly, working-class women suffered additional burdens from frequent childbearing, exclusion from skilled trades, and unequal access to existing schooling. Not until the Education Act of 1870 was an attempt made to ensure that every child receive a rudimentary primary school education until the age of ten, and even this minimal reform was unevenly enforced until the end of the nineteenth century.2 David Vincent’s The Rise of Mass Literacy (2000) records the sobering fact that in 1840 only 50% of the female population of Britain could sign their name in a marriage register, and though by 1870 this figure had risen to 70%, it seems clear that only the more fortunate and gifted among mid-Victorian working-class women could have aspired to literary composition.3

Budarick analyses the work of African-Australian media producers working in the ethnic minority, community and public service media sectors in Australia through the mediums of print, broadcast and the Internet. Based on a thematic analysis of 14 in-depth interviews with black African journalists, writers and broadcasters in Australia, the chapter examines ways in which interviewees discuss and explain their media work, including their motivations, their aims and the role they see their media playing in Australian society. The findings of the study are placed within a historical context of ethnic media production in Australia and internationally in a way that teases out themes of integration, multiculturalism, self-representation and identity politics. The chapter will demonstrate the way in which participants’ media work is contextualised by experiences of structural inequality, marginalisation from the communicative environment and a desire to provide a ‘voice of our own’ to an African, and wider Australian, audience.

Ireland’s Traveller and Roma populations, although distinct, face a number of shared challenges, the most concerning of which is deep-rooted and widespread racism. At the same time however, there is little documented evidence of hate crime against these two communities. This chapter addresses the paucity of data on anti-Traveller and anti-Roma hate crime with specific reference to the Republic of Ireland. Following a profile of the two communities and a discussion of anti-Traveller and anti-Roma racism in Irish society, we focus on examining the possibilities for Traveller and Roma visibility offered by official and civil society hate crime recording mechanisms. The remainder of the chapter discusses the particular relevance of a number of recognised and less acknowledged obstacles to reporting for Traveller and Roma communities in Ireland. The chapter concludes that the paucity of documentation of anti-Traveller and anti-Roma hate crime in Ireland is both a function of, and contributes to, extreme structural inequality.

This chapter provides the theoretical framing for the discussion of violence and social urbanism in Medellin, drawing on work from geography, urban studies, political science, and regionally specific explorations of violence in Latin American cities. Theories of violence have tended to situate the problem either with the individual, in terms of criminal pathology, or with structural inequality. This chapter proposes a more dynamic analysis of violence as process, with a focus on how violence becomes a means to attain and retain power, and how violence enters into the ‘common sense’ of political and social life. This framework can offer an analysis of how places become violent, how violence relates to urban politics and geography, and, as may be the case in Medellin, how transformations in political processes may address the root causes of violence.

Clennon provides an overview of some of the issues Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities can face in the UK education sector. He explores the concepts of “Culture of Low Expectations” and “Changing the Ideological landscapes in our Schools and Classrooms”. Clennon looks at how these concepts can be used to counter institutional stereotyping and racism in education. The chapter also outlines the rise of the market in education and its exacerbating impact on existing structural inequalities within the sector. Clennon also draws attention to some of the theoretical discourse around Power and how it is mediated, using Foucault, Bourdieu, Althusser and others as a means of underpinning his summary of some of the ideological and philosophical challenges BAME communities can encounter while trying to navigate the UK’s education system.

The concluding chapter summarizes the main empirical findings and highlights the complexity of discursive repertoires that frame political debates about integration policies in Germany and Great Britain. I discuss how distinct national institutional, legal and discursive opportunity structures offer reference points for minority claims, and demonstrate how currently circulating discourses themselves offer distinct opportunities and constraints for minority actors to challenge structural asymmetries. I summarize how empirical variants of civic republican, multicultural, civic universal and denationalized citizenship have been found to problematize or mask various manifestations of structural inequality. Reflecting on the subject positions facilitated by these four discourses, I elaborate on the implications the findings have for Nancy Fraser’s critique of identity politics as a mode of claims-making.

This chapter will analyze women’s access to and participation in Mexico’s news media. At the intersections of feminism and the political economy of communication, we will put into context the findings for Mexico in the Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media (Global Report) (Byerly 2011). Our purpose is to establish that the access and participation of women in Mexico’s news media are (a) identified by gender inequality, (b) subject to a structural problem and not just an accident or a circumstance exclusive of one industry, (c) marked by structural inequality, i.e., the higher the position, the wider the gap of gender inequality, and (d) defined by a gender division of labor that is a feature of the incorporation of women to these industries.

Where we live and what it can offer contributes to the uneven distribution of health chances; by the same token, investment at the local level can alleviate wider structural inequality and its effects. Certain groups of people — those on low incomes, at certain stages of the life phase or at vulnerable times of their lives — tend to be more reliant than others on the local arena and its resources. Where local conditions are favourable, life chances can be enhanced; where inadequate, vulnerabilities are compounded. The part played by a general sense of well-being in the development of social inequalities in physical or mental health based on conventional measures, and in disparities between poor areas themselves, becomes more transparent once we acknowledge the multifarious influences on well-being and happiness and the particular significance of resources in poor areas needed to support different aspects of people’s lives.

In her recollection of childhood in 1960s’ and 1970s’ England, Lorna spoke of the shame she had felt because of where she came from. The Larkman social housing estate in Norwich, where she grew up, and the adjacent estates of Marlpit and North Earlham, which were often associated with it, had a reputation in the rest of the city. Here is Lorna again: if someone says the Larkman, ‘Oh, she lives over the Larkman, she comes from the Larkman’, that engenders a very particular response from people in Norwich… even people who come from what I would consider other big council estates.

‘Masochism’ is a term perhaps not commonly associated with men or masculinity. Similarly, movies have rarely received much serious study within the world of sociology and social science, or even sexual politics, while studies of masculinity still tend to see analysis of such popular cultural texts as films as rather small or trivial fry compared with such serious topics as work, violence and structural inequality (Edwards, 2006). This is perhaps not surprising given the legacy of over 40 years of Second Wave feminism. Masochism, in its connection with femininity for many feminists, could easily be seen as a form of justification for, even celebration of, the subordination of women (Caplan, 1993).

All international comparative studies are rendered questionable by the heterogeneity of the nomenclatures upon which national census, enumerations and indicators are based. Socio-economic or professional activity categories, for instance, generally present methodological problems for the comparative analysis of employment issues. These difficulties are also often theoretical and epistemological in nature. Such is the case, particularly for immigrant populations and their descendants on the one hand, and for cultural or so-called ‘racial’ minorities on the other hand. One of the characteristics of French official statistics is the almost total elimination of any ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ classification: the gathering of such data is virtually prohibited by law and analyses concerning these populations are extremely difficult to undertake. Consequently, international comparisons are almost impossible. The press, the body politic and the man in the street refer to these populations using terms that have widely varying definitions and which often reveal themselves as contradictory, mixing together judicial and geographical, linguistic and religious concepts. These issues nevertheless give rise to highly controversial debates that are much more political in nature than a detached scientific approach.

The process of capital accumulation is a, if not the, principal motor of modern history and constitutes the central problem examined in this book. Yet capital accumulation, and its treatment here, poses a number of fundamental theoretical and therefore also empirical questions that remain largely unresolved. These questions fall into four related categories: (1) primitive, primary, and capitalist capital accumulation; (2) the unequal structure and relations of production, circulation, and realization in capital accumulation; (3) uneven transformation of capital accumulation through stages, cycles, and crises; and (4) unending class struggle in capital accumulation, through the state, war, and revolution. Insofar as one single and continuous process of capital accumulation has existed in this world for several centuries, this heuristic division of the problem into unequal structure, uneven process, and so on is necessarily arbitrary. The structural inequality and temporal unevenness of capital accumulation, on the other hand, are inherent to capitalism.