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This article traces the career, scientific achievements, and emigration of the Berlin-born physician, psychoanalyst, and psychosomatic researcher Eric Wittkower. Trained in Berlin and practicing internal medicine, he became persecuted by the Nazi regime and, after fleeing Germany via Switzerland, continued his professional career in the United Kingdom, where he turned to psychosomatic medicine and worked in the service of the British Army during World War II. After two decades of service in the UK, Wittkower joined McGill University in Canada. His increasingly interdisciplinary work contributed to the establishment of the new research field of transcultural psychiatry. Finally the paper provides a detailed history of the beginning of the section of transcultural psychiatry at the Allan Memorial Institute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically engages with a recent shift towards an emphasis on ‘resilience’ in policy and academic fields. The paper suggests that this shift is problematic for several reasons: that it supports normative value judgements; that it may overemphasize the ability of people to ‘bounce back’ and undervalue the hidden costs of resilience, especially those with gendered dimensions; and that it may be associated with policy prescriptions that shift responsibility for dealing with crisis away from the public sphere. The empirical illustration for this analysis is a qualitative study of the impact of economic decline in the Sussex town of Newhaven. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the production, working and impact of the UK's hostile environment on migrant families with precarious legal status. Our approach is informed by two bodies of scholarly work: critical border studies and research on migrant families. We bridge these literatures to show how the hostile environment is neither a singular, neatly bounded space, nor limited to a set of interactions between immigration enforcement and a clear-cut group of people (so-called 'illegal immigrants'). It affects the lives of a wider segment of the UK population, in particular racialised migrants and citizens, by making their legal status more insecure and precarious, and percolates in multiple and intersecting domains in the lives of families, such as education, housing and welfare, making them ambivalent sites of protection and safety as well as control and enforcement. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with families with insecure immigration statuses, we explore how the hostile environment manifests in the everyday lives of families; how the hostile environment circulates and is re-enacted within the micro-politics of families; and how families negotiate the continuous work of protecting children from the effects of the hostile environment. In conclusion we argue that dramatic and rapid shifts in immigration rules and regulations undermine the capacity of mothers to navigate the policy environment and welfare for their children and to shield them from the consequences of state-driven hostility towards immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free School Meals (FSM) have been the site of renewed contestation and extensive campaigning in the last half-decade. Until recently, children in families with 'no recourse to public funds' because of their immigration status were excluded from accessing FSMs, despite being some of the most destitute in Britain. Through an analysis of campaign materials and interviews with advocates, we consider this dynamic policy terrain in light of the UK's 'hostile environment' and consider lessons for campaigners. By exploring imaginaries of childhood, poverty, and nation shaping FSM policies, we offer a warning that campaigns can end up justifying exclusions at the same time as aiming for more expansive support. How campaigns represent their causes has implications, which, in this case, is often through the exceptionalism and hyper-deservingness of childhood. We argue these representations reduce discussion to technical questions about who is 'deserving', thereby risking shoring up an exclusionary and hostile state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural psychiatry research in the UK comprises a broad range of diverse methodologies, academic disciplines, and subject areas. Methodologies range from epidemiological to anthropological/ethnographic to health services research; mixed methods research is becoming increasingly popular, as are public health and health promotional topics. After briefly outlining the history of cultural psychiatry in the UK we will discuss contemporary research. Prominent themes include: the epidemiology of schizophrenia among Africans/Afro-Caribbeans, migration and mental health, racism and mental health, cultural identity, pathways to care, explanatory models of mental illness, cultural competence, and the subjective experiences of healthcare provision among specific ethnic groups such as Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. Another strand of research that is attracting increasing academic attention focuses upon the relationship between religion, spirituality, and mental health, in particular, the phenomenology of religious experience and its mental health ramifications, as well as recent work examining the complex links between theology and psychiatry. The paper ends by appraising the contributions of British cultural psychiatrists to the discipline of cultural psychiatry and suggesting promising areas for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an attempt to understand youth-related antisocial behaviour, UK social policy has typically sought answers from the edge; investigating the motivations of young people perpetrating deviant behaviour or exploring the experiences of victims. Equally polarised and sensationalist narratives are present in journalistic accounts, with Knight's Hood Rat and BBC documentary The Scheme both depicting the lives of young people in 'disadvantaged' neighbourhoods as on the margins of society. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a Scottish housing estate, this paper calls for a localised and situated approach to understanding 'the antisocial'. The empirical data shows that young people do not fit easily into the dualist categories of 'perpetrator' or 'victim'. Despite living in what could be classed an 'antisocial' place the majority of young people's everyday experiences were not spent on the margins but rather somewhere in-between, while their own identities were described as normal and unspectacular. The paper concludes by emphasising the value of research that situates understandings of 'the antisocial' within its everyday social context. This offers us the opportunity to take a broader analysis of young lives and crucially re-establish the connection between lives on the margins and the 'missing middle'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discursive rhetoric of responsibility has become associated with a neo-liberal ‘responsibilisation’ agenda, typified by policy approaches to rough sleeping in England. I draw on feminist ethics of care literature to provide a critical discussion of responsibility. Informed by original ethnographic research I explore how responsibility is practised and negotiated between rough sleepers and local actors through on-site food provisioning activities in the city of Newcastle in northeast England. A distinction and tension was identified between voluntary organisations’ ‘taking care of’ rough sleepers’ food needs, and commissioned service providers and rough sleepers who articulated a ‘caring with’ approach; both practices highlighted a complex interplay between care and responsibilisation framings. The research revealed how these discourses interacted to inform the implementation and responsiveness of local voluntary and policy actors, to the extent that responsibilisation was made possible by the purposeful rendering of collective and situated care practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]