By Sarah Armstrong and Lucy Pickering

This study was funded by the Chief Scientist Office, Scottish Government, as part of its Rapid Research in Covid-19 Programme and was conducted between July and December 2020. The study was completed by a team of researchers at the University of Glasgow and supported by 20 partners from the third sector. The research focused on the impact of Covid-19 restrictions (‘lockdown’) for four groups already experiencing exclusion, isolation and marginalisation: people having a disability or long-term health condition (DHC); People involved in criminal justice (CJS); Refugees and people seeking asylum who were at risk of destitution (RAD); People surviving domestic abuse or sexual violence (DASV). As a rapid research project, the study aims to understand and report on the impacts of Covid-19 restrictions as they are happening, in order to contribute to better responses to it; the analysis presented may be further developed and modified. It has been recognised that social research is needed alongside medical and health research to understand the effects of this pandemic on individual and collective wellbeing. Already evidence has established that social inequalities are shaping Covid-19 risk and impact, but the evidence base is not yet well-established for Scotland.  

Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2020. 167p.

By Janice M. Irvine

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 349p.