Table Of ContentCultural Politics in the
Age of Austerity
In 2008 another economic crisis emerged in the long history of
capitalism which created a period of ‘austerity economics’ across
many nations. Cultural Politics in the Age of Austerity examines
how austerity has impacted upon cultural politics in relation to
understanding how established power is both maintained and
challenged.
The book begins by detailing the meaning of cultural politics
before exploring themes such as media discourse, austerity narra-
tives, class, cultural hegemony/government policymaking, social
movements and the European Union, and left responses to auster-
ity. It also includes chapters tracing cultural politics in Spain, with
a focus on anti-austerity movements and the relationship between
austerity and Spanish football.
Cultural Politics in the Age of Austerity assesses the impact of a
range of cultural/political forms concerning the dynamics of soci-
ety and relations of power during times of crisis. As such, it will
appeal to scholars of culture, media, politics, philosophy, sociol-
ogy and social psychology.
David Berry is Senior Lecturer in Media, Communication and
Culture at Southampton Solent University, UK, and the author of
The Romanian Mass Media and Cultural Development and Jour-
nalism, Ethics and Society. He is the co-author of Public Policy
and Media Organizations, the co-editor of Radical Mass Media
Criticism: A Cultural Genealogy and British Marxism and Cul-
tural Studies: Essays on a living tradition, and the editor of Ethics
and Media Culture: Representations and Practices and Revisiting
the Frankfurt School: Essays on Media, Culture and Theory.
The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture
Series Editor: C. Richard King
Washington State University, USA
Dedicated to a renewed engagement with culture, this series fos-
ters critical, contextual analyses and cross-disciplinary examina-
tions of popular culture as a site of cultural politics. It welcomes
theoretically grounded and critically engaged accounts of the pol-
itics of contemporary popular culture and the popular dimensions
of cultural politics. Without being aligned to a specific theoretical
or methodological approach, The Cultural Politics of Media and
Culture publishes monographs and edited collections that pro-
mote dialogues on central subjects, such as representation, iden-
tity, power, consumption, citizenship, desire and difference.
Offering approachable and insightful analyses that complicate
race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability and nation across various
sites of production and consumption, including film, television,
music, advertising, sport, fashion, food, youth, subcultures and
new media, The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture
welcomes work that explores the importance of text, context and
subtext as these relate to the ways in which popular cultures work
alongside hegemony.
For a full list of titles, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/
The-Cultural-Politics-of-Media-and-Popular-Culture/book-series/
ASHSER-1395
Also available in the series:
Post-9/11 Heartland Horror
Rural horror films in an era of urban terrorism
Victoria McCollum
Belligerent Broadcasting
Synthetic argument in broadcast talk
Michael Higgins and Angela Smith
Cultural Politics in the Age of Austerity
Edited by David Berry
Cultural Politics in the
Age of Austerity
Edited by David Berry
First published 2017
by Routledge
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individual chapters, the contributors
The right of David Berry to be identified as the author
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Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Preface ix
DAvID BERRY
1 Cultural politics, austerity and responses 1
DAvID BERRY
2 Unmasking the golem: English riots, media and
the social psychology of madness 23
GLEN PARKINSON
3 Remembrance and the working class soldier hero
in austerity Britain 47
MAGGIE ANDREWS
4 ‘We have to keep going, whatever happens’:
the austerity narratives of Girls, Breaking Bad
and Downton Abbey 67
SALLIE McNAMARA
5 Managing the social impacts of austerity Britain:
the cultural politics of neo-liberal ‘nudging’ 93
EMMA L. BRIANT AND STEvEN HARKINS
6 Class and cultural colonization in the era of austerity:
the dialectics of identity and de-subordination 120
MARK HAYES
7 The European Union project, social movements
and alienation 145
DAvID BERRY
vi Contents
8 Cultural politics and anti-austerity movements
in Spain: towards a comprehensive strategy of change 170
JOAN PEDRO
9 The sweet smell of success: Spanish football as
the antidote to austerity since 2008 191
JIM O’BRIEN
10 Orwell’s progeny: the British left in an age
of austerity 216
PHILIP BOUNDS
Index 237
Notes on contributors
Maggie Andrews is Professor of Cultural History at the University
of Worcester and author of a range of publications, including
The Acceptable Face of Feminism (2015), and co-editor of Lest
We Forget: Remembrance and Commemoration (2011). Maggie is
Co-Investigator for AHRC funded ‘voices of War’ and ‘Peace First
World War Community Engagement Hub’ and historical consult-
ant for the first series of a new BBC Radio 4 drama Home Front.
David Berry has published since 2000 and will continue into the
future. He has a PhD.
Philip Bounds holds a PhD in Politics from the University of
Wales and has published widely on the intellectual history of
the British left. His books include Orwell and Marxism (2009),
British Communism and the Politics of Literature (2012) and
Notes from the End of History (2014).
Emma L. Briant specialises in political communication at the
University of Sheffield. Her research interests are propaganda
and US, and British governmental adaptation to a changing me-
dia and conflict environment. Her PhD (University of Glasgow,
2011) examined Anglo-American counter-terrorism propaganda
strategies since 9/11, the subject of her latest book Propaganda
and Counter-terrorism.
Steven Harkins is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate at the University
of Sheffield’s Department of Journalism Studies. His research
examines news coverage of poverty and inequality. He is also
part of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Expert Communica-
tions Group, and his research can be found in Critical Discourse
Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism and the British Medical
Journal.
Mark Hayes is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Criminology at
Solent University. He has published widely on a range of topics.
viii Notes on contributors
His latest book is The Ideology of Fascism and the Far Right in
Britain (2014).
Sallie McNamara is Senior Lecturer at Southampton Solent
University. Publications include ‘Lady Eleanor Smith and the
Society Column, 1927–1930’ in Women and the Media: Feminism
and Femininity in Britain, 1900 to the Present (2014) and ‘Mask
and Mascara: The Female Masquerade in Women’s Historical
Romances of the 1930s and 1940s’ in Beauty: Politics, Poetics,
Change (2014).
Jim O’Brien is Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Sports Journalism
at Southampton Solent University. He has previously held posts
in the Netherlands, Greece and the United States and has writ-
ten extensively on the historical, political and cultural contexts
of Spanish football in recent years.
Glen Parkinson is an independent-minded individual.
Joan Pedro holds a PhD in Communication, Social Change and
Development from Complutense University, Madrid, Spain. He
is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication at Saint
Louis University-Madrid Campus. Joan is interested in the theory
and practice of social change through communication, education
and culture.
Preface
David Berry
This book is a collection of essays on various themes and per-
spectives within the context of the period known as the ‘Age of
Austerity’. This period began in 2008 with the collapse of commer-
cial enterprises and increases in sub-prime mortgages in the US
spreading to banking systems and nation-states within Europe and
beyond. ‘Age of Austerity’ is a curious term in the sense that aus-
terity economics are nothing new within the historical structures
of capitalist development. In fact, it’s fair to argue that austerity
has been and will continue to be a central feature of said devel-
opment; it is as Marx would have it, the inherent contradiction of
the system itself. Austerity is no more than a reaction imposed by
elites to the re-emerging crisis of capitalism, and its impact and
consequences are traditionally/historically more brutally imposed
upon the working class and the poorest communities. One essential
difference of this current phase of crisis is that austerity has also
impacted upon the middle class, which further alters the dynamics
of cultural politics.
Despite the fact that the period from 2008 onwards is but
another crisis, this present ‘Age of Austerity’ does have some unique
features that separate it from previous forms. One, in Europe it
was formed post-fascism and post-communism (1989 political
revolutions); two, the enlargement and incorporation of former
fascist and Stalinist states into the European Union; three, the ex-
pansion of China and Russia into global markets; four, the hegem-
onic position of global capital (the End of History theory) and five,
in the United Kingdom the perverse idea forwarded by the former
leader of the Tories, David Cameron that ‘we are all in it together’
which defined austerity, in the UK, in purely ideological terms.
The overall objective of this book is to assess the relationship
between austerity and cultural politics which briefly can be meas-
ured in terms of resistance and /or imposition of established norms
which is exactly what Cameron’s phrase was meant to create (i.e.
an attempt to rationalize, normalize and legitimize the status quo).
