The title of a round table at the 2016 Social Policy Association conference – What can and should the Social Policy Association do to resist radically and resolutely? – highlights the commitment to practices of resistance and critique within the academy. The contributions in this section of the book draw attention to different aspects of critique, as well as to the importance of ideas in understanding how policies change.

Garthwaite's chapter on food banks focuses on the discourses around deservingness, choice and gratitude in emergency food provision. Food banks, she reminds us, are located in a government narrative of ‘shirkers and scroungers’, with many MPs going on record to express doubts about people's level of neediness. Her participant observer data, generated through two years of volunteering at a food bank, gives a powerful insight into the lived experience of food bank users. She draws attention to the role that welfare professionals have to play in assessing deservingness in relation to allocating food vouchers. Narratives of being ‘genuine’ versus ‘undeserving’ also feature in the attitudes of volunteers at the food bank, suggesting – Garthwaite argues – the pervasiveness of media representations of poverty in general and food banks in particular.

A particularly powerful section of her chapter relates to the extent to which people should be allowed choice over what is contained within their food package. As she puts it, ‘why should it be frowned upon when people express distaste or desire for a certain brand of food?’ There is a strong sense that this contravenes the gratitude that food bank volunteers (and perhaps some readers) expect. She ends the chapter with an affirmation that every individual deserves food, irrespective of their supposed behavioural ‘choices’.

Natalie Booth's chapter on maternal imprisonment is infused with the same undertone of critique of the ways in which penal arrangements remain prisoner-centric and fail to recognise a women's maternal status and familial responsibilities. She draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 imprisoned mothers, exploring the impact on their identities and practices of mothering, and the implications for children and families. The powerful statistic that only 5% of children remain in their own homes once their mother is removed to prison dramatically underlines the framing of imprisonment as a family sentence.