Author: Imogen Tyler
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Review of “Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality” by Dr Devyani Prabhat
Review by Dr Devyani Prabhat, 26th November 2020 – reblogged from Sociological Review. Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality is a book that connects a variety of contexts, including penal power, black power, borders, and austerity, through the use of stigma power. It is a demonstration of what C Wright Mills calls the ‘sociological imagination’, the ability…
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Black Lives Matter and Legacies of Slave Ownership in Lancaster: the Bond’s and the Booker Brothers in Guyana
Tracing Threads of Connection This is a photograph of Malena and Temi, both pupils at a local school, participating in a Black Lives Matter Protest on the steps of the Town Hall in Dalton Square, Lancaster, in June 2020. The photograph was taken by their friend, my 17-year old daughter, Bella, and is published here…
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The double-consciousness of the stigmatised
A short slightly adapted extract from chapter 5 of Stigma Sociological Imagination In The Sociological Imagination (1959), the American sociologist Charles Wright Mills famously stated that ‘no social study that does not come back to the problem of biography, of history and their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey’.[i] Indeed, the promise…
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Decolonising Lancaster: a Preliminary Resource List for local teachers and community groups working on Lancaster’s Slavery and Plantation histories
This photograph depicts the Rawlinson’s Family Memorial Grave Stone, which sits just outside the front of Lancaster Priory and was defaced in June 2020, as part of Black Lives Matter Protests in Lancaster. Rev. Canon Chris Newlands commented on the defacement of this memorial “We can’t remove our history, but we want to make sure the city…
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Austerity UK: The Enclosure of the Welfare Commons
This is an extract from Chapter 4 ‘The Stigma Machine of Austerity’. The theme of enclosures runs through Stigma. One of the arguments of this chapter is that austerity should be understood as a form of capitalist enclosure. Enclosures of land, resources, people, are often lubricated by stigma. It is easier to take bread from the mouths…
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‘Colonise at home!’ Paupers, Serfs, Slaves and the making of the English State
I am continuing to blog some extracts from my new book, of Stigma: the Machinery of Inequality. I have chosen this extract as it is also one of the starting points for my current project on “Decolonising Lancaster” and the histories of slavery and plantation labour which shaped this small city in Lancashire. This extract…
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Stigma: the Machinery of Inequality, a short animated film
Thanks to Tom Morris (and also bow & arrow who did the sound design) for this short animated film. Below is the text spoken in the film which is taken from the Introduction of the book. palerlotus.tumblr.com(opens in a new tab) The word stigma, as the dictionary defines it, is a mark of disgrace which is pressed…
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Misogyny and stigma
In this short extract from Chapter One ‘the Penal History of Stigma’ from Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality I tease out some historical threads to illustrate the entanglement of stigma and patriarchal systems of discipline and punishment. —————- In Women and Power: A Manifesto (2017), Mary Beard teaches us that women of all social classes…
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The Stigma Politics of Caste
This extract from ‘The Penal Tatoo’, chapter one of Stigma: the Machinery of Inequality, argues that the stigma politics of caste is particularly instructive for understanding how power is inscribed on the body, and the ways in which stigma power is entangled with histories of racial and colonial capitalism. ‘Even after two decades, the sound…
Professor Imogen Tyler 