bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Small but Complex: The Governance and Management of Public Higher Education Institutions – the Case of Malta
Authors: Borg Colin , Borg Carmel , Baldacchino Godfrey
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines the relationship between the geographical smallness of an island and its impact on the governance and management of public higher education institutions (HEIs). The University of Malta serves as a case study and as a basis for providing a commentary on the latest developments in this subject. The chapter also attempts to elicit comparative lessons from other small islands with similar conditions to Malta. Essentially, it reviews the small island realities of HEIs, as they strive to serve their island’s economic, social and cultural ambitions through predominantly public-sourced funds, while in parallel performing on a global higher education stage that is increasingly becoming more international, privatized, competitive and commodified. The ultimate outcome of this piece is to create a framework of the strengths, challenges and barriers that public HEIs in small islands experience. Their performance is tested against the benchmarks of efficiency, effectiveness and quality, which, in turn, are impacted by: the state’s overbearing presence in the financial and governing interests of the institution; national policies on education and beyond; an ongoing drive for massification of higher education; economic pressures and persistent demands from employers; transnational expectations, largely driven by employment targets; and sustainability issues.
The Perceived Quality of Higher Education in Oceania: Autoethnographic Insights from the Regional University of the South Pacific
Authors: Goundar Sargam , Kessler Kim Andreas , Baldacchino Godfrey
Published: January 2025

Research on the quality of higher education in the island states of Oceania has so far contributed to a ‘deficit discourse’, depicting Oceanian universities as ‘second-class’, rather than studying such notions of quality from a critical perspective. In response, this chapter introduces a research focus on the perceived quality of higher education in Oceania. We employ an autoethnographic methodology to unpack the perceived quality of the regional University of the South Pacific (USP) and theorize our empirical findings through a geographical-spatial lens. Our findings show that ‘islandness’, in its physical form and as a social feature of place connotation, can create different kinds of (mis-)perceptions of USP’s quality. While USP is widely regarded as a premier university from within Oceania, it is prone to be underestimated from outside the region as well as from certain positionalities within the university. More (auto-)ethnographic research can be useful to further deconstruct notions of quality of universities in the island states of Oceania and beyond.
Island Higher Education and Youth Migration: Retention, Attraction or Rotation?
Authors: Alexander Rosie , Baldacchino Godfrey
Published: January 2025

Existing policy discourses in the north of Scotland focus on expanding higher education provision in the region in order to support both individuals (and their aspirations) and the regional economy. However, drawing on data from a research project with students from the islands of Orkney and Shetland, the chapter argues that there are significant limitations in the capacity of on-island higher education provision in the small islands in the region to meet the needs of all islanders and all areas of the economy. Rather, this chapter suggests that higher education planning in small islands needs to acknowledge intersecting local, regional, national and global dynamics in provision of higher education, and move towards thinking about how to function effectively within these dynamics. This involves accounting for skills flows and skills routes, and considering not just on-island higher education delivery but also the accessibility of, and routes through, other (mainland) higher education providers.
Insularity and Internationalization: The Case of Mauritius
Authors: Motala-Timol Shaheen , Baldacchino Godfrey
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, the focus is on internationalization of higher education in Mauritius, a small island state in the Indian Ocean, which aspires to make higher education a pillar of its economy and transform itself into a knowledge hub in the region. It is shown how despite inherent constraints associated with small island states such as smallness, insularity and geographic location, national strategic plans and an enabling regulatory environment have supported the growth of the higher education sector. One strategic priority, and a goal, for Mauritius is internationalization of higher education. This chapter demonstrates how the chosen measures have been effective in internationalizing the sector. Beyond the usual benefits associated with internationalization, such as increased international students, provider and programme mobility, the chapter further discusses the influence and the impact of the distinctive colonial history and legacy in Mauritius on the higher education growth trajectory and strategy. It concludes that the future of internationalization, and indeed that of higher education, could be considered from a decolonial perspective and that implementation of evidence-based policies would be beneficial for the socioeconomic development of Mauritius.
Approaching Energy and Climate Justice: Working Towards More Just Scholarship, Pedagogy and Praxis
Authors: Chatti Deepti
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses emergent questions about energy justice and climate justice scholarship, pedagogy and praxis, based on several interdisciplinary, community-engaged research projects in India and the United States. Based on qualitative research and fieldwork-based methods, the chapter argues that rather than a fixed set of principles or ideas, the concepts of energy and climate justice are polysemic and grounded in the environmental and social justice struggles of specific geographic contexts. The chapter concludes with several questions for researchers to grapple with, centring questions of responsibility, positionality, reciprocity and building just relations across international contexts or across institutional identities while conducting fieldwork, and across epistemic divides in interdisciplinary teams with both positivist and critical scholars across the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and engineering.
Perspectives from the Top: Justice, International Relations and the Political Geography of the Arctic
Authors: Wood-Donnelly Corine
Published: January 2025

This chapter reflects on the relationship between International Relations theory, theories of justice and the Arctic. It discusses how the ‘perspectives from the top’ can be understood from expressions of geography, environmental processes, as well as politics and decision-making. In answering three questions, it considers what is the role of justice in shaping research interests, how ideals of justice influence engagement with research participants and research practices, and, finally, what justice contributes to understandings of the Arctic. It concludes that justice is a vector that can bring a more nuanced understanding of the scales and substance of injustice to create pathways towards bringing about more just conditions not only for the Arctic but for all of the international system.
Justice for All? Expanding Questions and Spaces of (In)Justice through Multispecies Research, Teaching and Activism
Authors: White Richard J. , Véron Ophélie , Springer Simon , McGregor Andrew
Published: January 2025

Reflecting on the appeal for ‘multispecies justice for all’, this chapter argues how this might be addressed to better challenge speciesism, and inform new radical geographies of liberation. To these ends, the main body of the chapter is composed of four case studies, commentaries and reflections, in which each author draws on a range of personal experiences and context to think through ways in which they are trying to share space more justly. Looking to the future, the chapter argues for the importance of embracing a vegan praxis more fully, to better inform and animate multispecies justice research, teaching and activism.
Concluding Thoughts: What Does It Mean to Do ‘Just’ Research?
Authors: Herman Agatha , Inwood Joshua
Published: January 2025

This chapter reflects on the volume’s contributions, recognizing the varied and contested ways we enact justice in our work and lives. Critically, this book does not represent a singular view of justice, but instead uses a plurality of perspectives to argue for a broad view of justice as praxis. What emerged from these diverse accounts were a common questioning of the purpose of the university, the role that a contemporary academic ought to play, the importance of context in determining our capability to do just research and the little-discussed emotional labour all research entails. The chapter develops a set of core elements for ‘best practice’ alongside a series of reflective questions that researchers can use to support engagement with just research as a messy and constant work-in-progress. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of being responsive to the dynamic, multidimensional and intersectional contextuality of research to make space for the reflexive and dialogical nature of justice.
Introduction: What, Why and How of Reimagining
Authors: Judge David , Leston-Bandeira Cristina
Published: January 2025

Taking reimagining to mean ‘the action or an act of imagining something again, a reconstruction; a remake’, this chapter identifies what is to be reimagined in this book, who is going to be doing the reimagining, and the approaches adopted in reimagining. This introduction makes clear that the specific focus of the book is the UK parliament; that those doing the reimagining bring together perspectives of both senior parliamentary officials, researchers and academics drawing upon wide disciplinary expertise; and that foundational principles drive the reimagining of the parliamentary activities under consideration in later chapters. This introductory chapter also provides an ideational frame – constructed around notions of space, connectivity and interaction – within which key parliamentary activities can be reimagined. This frame is used in this chapter to provide brief overviews of the contemporary significance, and condition, of parliament and to make the case that now would appear to be the time ‘to think seriously about starting over’ when imagining the UK parliament at the heart of a broader political system of parliamentary democracy.
Reimagining Parliamentary Space
Authors: Meakin Alexandra
Published: January 2025

This chapter makes the case for a reimagining of existing parliamentary spaces at Westminster. This case is based upon an exploration of four different purposes of the parliamentary building: as a symbol of democracy; as a legislative space; as a working space; and as a public democratic space. Reimagining needs to consider the ‘stories’ told about the Palace of Westminster and about the foundational story of the UK parliament as ‘a symbol of democracy’. It needs to envision how to design and create a legislative building to best facilitate the business of the legislature. It needs to be more than just thinking about the public face of the buildings, but also about the space needed for the staff serving the legislature to work. And it needs to acknowledge the legislature as a public space, where public access should be the default, rather than a privilege. The chapter concludes that a reimagined parliamentary building would empower new ways of working for Members and staff, create new ways of connecting with the public, and provide a symbol of a legislature not just of the past but of the future.
Reimagining Rhythms, Rituals and Symbols
Authors: Crewe Emma
Published: January 2025

This chapter identifies problems found within Westminster that exacerbate inequality, exclusion, unwellness and a shallow ethics. Four principles are proposed to guide thinking about how to reimagine parliament: a more inclusive approach to knowledge; promoting diversity, equity and the right to participate in democracy for all; enhancing wellness; and restoring standards and ethics. Rather than disciplining individuals, restructuring the system or changing the culture, all of which are only partial remedies, a reimagining of relationships in the Westminster parliament is called for. The chapter proposes reform of the rituals and symbols that exclude people and strengthen those that hold politicians more accountable; decelerate the rhythms of work and encourage prioritisation; challenge hierarchies of knowledge; and promote education on higher standards and ethics in political work for all.
Migration Literacies
Authors: Piacentini Teresa
Published: January 2025

This chapter introduces the new concept of migration literacies, which builds on critical literacies, critical media literacies and racial literacy. It focuses on the need to develop a deeper, critical understanding of the visible and invisible semantic institutionalization of migration governance in migration knowledge production (both policy and scholarly). The chapter argues for migration literacies to better understand how migration governance narratives not only prescribe migration as a problem but also offer technocratic solutions. The subsequent depoliticization of governance narratives and the colonial idioms of governance and control function as tools of coloniality that sustain deep inequalities in seemingly unproblematic ways. Pedagogically, such processes are also heavily implicated in the disciplining of how we talk and learn about migration. Using problem posing, case studies and teaching activities centred on language, policy categories and metaphors, the chapter reveals ethical and political blind spots in our migration grammar. It suggests building better migration literacies as a pedagogical framework to do the work of critically examining the semantic organization and institutionalization of migration management narratives in order to help us repoliticize our disciplinary grammars.
Impact and Refusal
Authors: Piacentini Teresa
Published: January 2025

This chapter addresses impact in the classroom and the role of the policy–research pipeline in driving research and teaching agendas, shaping migration governance language, and producing and privileging specific knowledge. First, it explores what the search for policy-relevant ‘useful research’ about migration means in practice and for building better migration literacies. Second, it examines how to think about impact as pedagogic practice through refusal and resistance. This chapter considers practices of resistance that interrupt what and how we learn, suggesting pedagogical methods that centre social justice and push us towards thinking ‘what if’. It offers case studies, problem-posing tasks and practical activities of collaboratively developing manifesto writing between students, teachers and practitioners. The chapter critically explores and expands on approaches that offer both possibilities and rewards as mechanisms of disruption and interruption, as well as of reimagining the doing and delivery of impact. It argues that we need careful engagement with the knotty ethical and political questions of impact in our pedagogic practice and the relationalities it centres and sidelines, not just in the classroom but beyond its walls.
Just Here for the Comments
Authors: Sipley Gina
Published: January 2025

We all sometimes ‘lurk’ in online spaces without posting or engaging, just reading the posts and comments. But neither reading nor lurking are ever passive acts. In fact, readers of social media are making decisions and taking grassroots actions on multiple dimensions. Unpacking this understudied phenomenon, this book challenges the conventional perspective of what counts as participatory online culture. Presenting lurking as a communication and literacy practice that resists dominant power structures, it offers an innovative approach to digital qualitative methods. Unique and original in its subject, this is a call for internet researchers to broaden their methods to include lurkers’ participation and presence.
“To Let Others Know They Are Not Alone”: Lurking and Community
Authors: Sipley Gina
Published: January 2025

Utilizing data from neighbourhood Facebook groups, this chapter analyses the ways that offline relationships influence online behaviour. This chapter argues that receptive reading, protective curation, and participatory restraint are lurker literacies readers engage in on social media to gratify desires to preserve their offline relationships with members of their community. Receptive reading occurs when a person wants to closely, and anonymously, read a social media commenting thread with the express purpose of understanding a divergent point of view. Protective curation is when a person reads to collect information to protect their socioeconomic status. This includes gathering information to professionally advance in one’s career and/or to maintain the perceived quality of their community life. Participatory restraint is a strategic choice whereby a person will purposefully not respond to an inflammatory social media post. A reader will purposefully refrain from commenting, liking, or sharing their dissent via publicity metrics. These efforts are sometimes taken individually and are sometimes collectively decided by a group using alternate, non-social media, communication methods.
“Aint That Special”: Moderating in the Age of Digital Exploitation
Authors: Sipley Gina
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the unpaid digital labour of moderators and how moderation style encourages or discourages a reader’s visible participation. This chapter examines three specific case studies – affinity groups (online communities where members share in a common goal), health communities, and neighbourhood groups – and introduces sensemaking to the discussion of lurker literacies. The chapter also offers critical content analysis of the evolution of Facebook group features and the corporation’s community management training programme to offer insights into the challenges of active Facebook moderation.
Resistance and Refusal: (Re)Evaluating Media Literacy
Authors: Sipley Gina
Published: January 2025

This chapter argues that the internet is a colonized space and, within that space, lurking is a privileged participatory act. Global media literacy standards are centred on acts of public participation and must adopt a more inclusive approach. Building on the work of media literacy scholars, this chapter seeks to broaden media literacy assessment from skill development and identifying bias to include the teaching of lurker literacies as resistance to surveillance and the amplification of misinformation.
Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature: Tracing More-Than-Human Aesthetics in Times of Socio-Ecological Crisis
Authors: Sehgal Melanie , Wilkie Alex
Published: January 2025

The present socio-ecological crises demand that we develop new ways of knowing and new kinds of action but also new ways of experiencing and feeling. To explore this demand, and inspired by A.N. Whitehead and Félix Guattari, this book outlines a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’: a generalized aesthetics acknowledging the primacy of aesthetic experience across all entities, phenomena and processes in order to sensitize contemporary knowledge practices to the nature and import of the present crises’ aesthetic dimensions. The book departs from the dominant understanding of aesthetics as a realm of human privilege and follows the transformation of our understanding of cultural and knowledge practices when predicated on aesthetic experience and feeling. This involves two interrelated assertions that upturn the prevailing understanding of aesthetics. First, aesthetics precedes and cannot be separated from knowledge: feeling and knowing are indivisible. Second, the ‘social’, typically seen as the source and cause of aesthetics, is itself the upshot of aesthetic processes. Taking up the proposition of generalized aesthetics, the contributors, from disciplines including cultural studies, design, English, law, geography, performance, philosophy and sociology, address how such an understanding of aesthetics plays out when confronted with environmental, technoscientific and ‘social’ matters of concern and care.
Whitehead, Dewey, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, Experience and Our World(s)
Authors: Halewood Michael
Published: January 2025

This chapter uses the ideas of Dewey and Whitehead to attempt to reorient the role and status of the aesthetic. It argues that the aesthetic is not so much about questions of beauty and art but about perception and feeling. This involves a move beyond Kantian notions and a foray into Whitehead’s (metaphysical) placement of feeling and perception as more-than-human elements which suffuse existence. The abstraction involved in such an account is counterbalanced with Dewey’s insistence upon examples and the here-and-now, which also leads to a (brief) consideration of the relations of the aesthetic to capitalism.
Geo-Narrativity: Anthropocene, Aesthetics, Forensics
Authors: Damianos Alexander
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines how the Anthropocene becomes perceptible as a speculative geological future through the medium of the technofossil. Invoking plastics, Styrofoam and other artefacts particular to the recent past, the technofossil is generative of a novel aesthetic remarkably successful at facilitating a sensitivity to geological deep time in the present. I develop an account of how the technofossil was invented, how it unfolds as an appropriation of palaeontological techniques, and how geologists draw on fossils as at once an impartial practice (the evidence is ‘set in stone’) while at once speaking ‘on behalf’ of technofossils to advance entirely political speculations about the future as well as contemporary society. The technofossil therefore unfolds as a speculative, forensic aesthetics.
Aesthetic Axiology: Amanda Piña’s Climatic Dances/Danzas Climáticas
Authors: Haas Maximilian
Published: January 2025

Addressing mountains as earth beings, the performance Climatic Dances/Danzas Climaticas by Amanda Piña problematizes the discord between Indigenous cosmologies and dance practices in Latin America and the Western art system, which the Austrian/Chilean choreographer links to a wider culture of extractivism. This chapter reads her work through A.N. Whitehead’s theory of value and analyses it using concepts drawn from Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers, Steven Shaviro and Alessandro Questa. It thus derives from the performance an approach towards non-extractive aesthetics in the face of ecological collapse.
Machinic Highs and Pathic Patchworks of Addicted Systems
Authors: Fuller Matthew , Goffey Andrew
Published: January 2025

Adopting, as its starting point for the engagement with more-than-human aesthetics, a discussion of the concept of the machinic ‘high’ to be found in the work of Félix Guattari, this chapter proposes an ‘ethico-aesthetic’ engagement with networked digital technologies. It considers the affective texture of human–computer interaction from a point of view that stresses the compulsive, even addictive dimension of media engagement but insists in particular on the complex ‘machinic’ configuration of technological systems. The concept of the ‘pathic’, derived from existential psychiatry, rewired in the work of Félix Guattari in the service of an environmental thinking that emphasizes the delicate nature of processes of morphogenesis, becomes a key operator in the chapter for exploring the productive ambiguities of data-driven forms of subjectivity.
On the Aesthetics of Care/Care of Aesthetics in Social Scientific Research
Authors: Michael Mike
Published: January 2025

Drawing on a Whiteheadian ‘ontological’ version of aesthetics, this chapter explores how we might accordingly grasp the event of social scientific research. How do we understand the social scientific research event as an aesthetic process marked by the conformation of its constituent heterogeneous elements? Folded into this analytic is the matter of care: by addressing the mutualities of aesthetics and care, the chapter unpacks how they can together elucidate the complexities of doing social scientific research. Beginning with practice-based research in design, two phases of doing research are identified: the phase of designing a prototype and the phase in which the prototype is installed with participants (or users) whose responses are subsequently collected. This raises the issue of ‘finishing’ and how the finish of a prototype (along with the related interactions among designers/researchers and users/participants) entails both aesthetics and care. From here, a more detailed explication of the mutualities of aesthetics and care is presented in the context of doing social scientific research more generally. Out of this emerges a number of points that begin to reframe care and raise a series of questions to interpellate difference, multiplicity, scale and irony into the Whiteheadian version of aesthetics.
Schools of Feeling: Unlearning the Bifurcation of Nature Through Aesthetic Education
Authors: Sehgal Melanie
Published: January 2025

This chapter raises the problem of unlearning the habit of organizing reality according to a bifurcated concept of nature whose destructive consequences have become fully palpable in the present socio-ecological crises. It reconstructs, within Whitehead’s work, a narrative of how this ensemble of habits of thought and feeling operate and persist across time and space; a knowledge regime at the centre of which lies the modern research university. The chapter then raises the question of unlearning the bifurcation of nature for which aesthetic education proves crucial. It develops an understanding of aesthetic education from a Whiteheadian perspective, contrasting it with a Kantian and Schillerian conception, and discusses instances of aesthetic education practices that – although not explicitly formulated in view of Whitehead’s reading of modernity and its present crisis – can be read in light of them and thus, correspondingly, of a new, generalized aesthetic paradigm. Considering educational practices at Black Mountain College, a Native Alaskan Initiative of curriculum reform and the German conception of ‘studium generale’, the chapter uses the ‘school’ as a heuristic to discuss the potentials and pitfalls of a generalized aesthetic paradigm turned educational. Finally, the chapter returns to Whitehead’s own proposition for aesthetic education, which he surprisingly locates in the realm of religion and spiritual experience.
Follow the Money: The Global Finance Industry
Authors: Lynes Adam , Treadwell James , Bavin Kyla
Published: January 2025

This chapter investigates the intricate web of illicit activities that span international borders, exploiting the complexities of the global financial system. Beginning with an exploration of the historical evolution of financial crime, the chapter delineates the changing nature of illicit financial activities and the adaptation of criminal enterprises to advancements in technology and globalisation. It investigates the emergence of sophisticated networks that transcend geographical boundaries, posing unprecedented challenges to regulatory bodies and law enforcement agencies. It also scrutinises the response of the global community in combating financial crime. It evaluates the effectiveness of international collaborations, regulatory frameworks and technological solutions in preventing, detecting and prosecuting those engaged in illicit financial activities. The examination also encompasses the role of financial institutions, regulatory bodies and law enforcement agencies in fostering a united front against global financial crime.
The Remote Control Over the Masses: The Media
Authors: Lynes Adam , Treadwell James , Bavin Kyla
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, we look at the ‘drug’ of nations: the media. We compare and contrast the in-your-face media practices of some of the authoritarian East, to the insidious practices of some of the Western media tycoons that often go unnoticed. From China’s social credit system to the BBC’s editorial guidelines, we highlight the coercive control that the media has over its global ‘customer’ base. Not only does it draw attention to the malpractices of the traditional global news media, but we also focus on the new media and provide a critical insight into the normalisation of being watched and how this normalisation has changed society’s notions of the Orwellian gaze of the omnipresent ‘Big Brother’ from a chilling prophecy to a much-coveted prosumer lifestyle.
Post-Carbon Inclusion: Transitions Built on Justice
Authors: Horne Ralph , Nelson Anitra , Ambrose Aimee , Walker Gordon
Published: January 2025

As efforts to address the climate crisis (hopefully) continue to multiply across the urban world, two central questions are brought to the fore: first, how could these efforts be made effective and sufficient to address the climate emergency and heal the planet for future generations? Second, to what extent can effective actions also promote justice and inclusion? To address these questions, this chapter sets out four starting premises and introduces key concepts of post-carbon inclusion, set against current initiatives on ecological modernization, circular economies, just transitions, socio-technical transitions and degrowth. Decarbonization and inequality are entangled at multiple scales, whether planetary, national, regional, city, local community or house(hold). The implications and ramifications of such socio-technological entanglement matter insofar as they might reinforce each other; they might present as a Faustian bargain. For example, is the rush for minerals to feed low carbon technology unacceptably exacerbating global ecosystem decline? This chapter describes how efforts to decarbonize necessarily disrupt and reconfigure domestic and urban scale infrastructures and practices, generating new patterns of difference and marginality, as illustrated in the various chapters throughout the book.
Alternatives to Justice for a Thriving Transition
Authors: Ambrose Aimee , Castano-Garcia Alvaro , Arbell Yael
Published: January 2025

The moral discourse around low carbon transitions currently favours justice as its main virtue (often expressed through the concept of just transition), often highlighting injustice within the current system. When we aim for justice, our focus is on what is lacking rather than what is possible. Low carbon transitions are an opportunity to reinvent our systems and ways of life but also the associated virtues that guide them. The transition must exclude no one and must prioritize those most in need and most disadvantaged by the current system. In this context, the concept of justice (transitioning away from fossil fuels in a way which promotes a fairer world) is a useful guide. But is justice all we should be aiming for? This chapter experiments with positioning alternative virtues as guiding principles for low carbon transitions and reflects on the implications for inclusion and the promotion of thriving through transition. Ultimately, we put forward an alternative framework, which does not ignore justice but promotes the virtues of generosity and care as foundations of justice or complements to it. In concert, these virtues have the potential to shape transitions from the starting point of genuine concern for the wellbeing of others.
Beyond Circular Economies: Rethinking Relations of Waste
Authors: Horne Ralph , Middha Bhavna
Published: January 2025

Ocean soups of plastic have provided increasingly visceral signs of major problems with modern systems of production and consumption, leading to calls for action towards ‘zero waste’ by promoting the circular economy (CE). While superficially attractive, the CE idea faces a raft of problems that extend well beyond the technical and the monetary to everyday social practices. This chapter charts the problematic imaginary of the CE idea and domestic waste. In so doing five key points are made. First, that the CE focus on technology and behaviour change pays insufficient attention to distributional impacts, inclusion and social life. Second, that current approaches to domestic recycling are set to exacerbate already existing inequalities, and are unlikely to advance sustainability. Third, socio-material entanglements in domestic waste are centred as a means to approach inclusion. Fourth, social practices and the capabilities approach are both proposed as foundations for a future domestic discard regime. Finally, ideas are presented for relational-informed local waste governance.
Future Directions for Post-Carbon Inclusion
Authors: Horne Ralph , Nelson Anitra , Walker Gordon , Ambrose Aimee
Published: January 2025

Inclusion is so central to the response to climate change that any response that does not place inclusion at the centre imperils the whole project and, therefore, the future of humanity. Current proposed solutions to mitigate climate change are exacerbating inequality, and feeding both misery and resistance to climate mitigation as a societal goal. While markets create the poverty and the social boundaries that imperil decarbonization, national governments protect national interests against planetary interests, inter-generational interests and inter-species interests. Post-carbon inclusion is, thus, not simply a ‘nice-to-have’ combination, rather it is a necessary agenda that supersedes decarbonization via business-as-usual processes. The implications for post-carbon inclusion research and practice are grouped here into three entangled and overlapping elements: mapping the terrain through deeper understandings of society and practice; resetting rights and justice; and empowerment and agency. The resultant agenda provides directions for research and policy communities working in partnership in the growing field of post-carbon inclusion studies. As pointed out by movements of environmental justice, degrowth and social justice, hope lies in new forms of engagement, in new agents and actors operating in new ways.
Racial Justice and the Limits of Law
Authors: Malkani Bharat
Published: January 2025

This book examines the relationship between law and the struggle for racial justice, with a view to explaining why and how the legal system has been both a help and a hindrance to racial justice activists. It traces the role of law in creating and perpetuating racial injustices in the era of the British Empire, as law was used to facilitate colonial rule. It then explores the impact of this on the development of immigration laws in the 20th century, and how this has affected contemporary efforts to use the legal system to advance the cause of racial justice. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, interpretations of colonial rule, and case law, the book sets out the limits of law and legal processes. But despite law’s shortcomings, there are possibilities of antiracist lawyering, and this book also sets out principles for adopting an antiracist approach to legal action.
Introduction
Authors: Malkani Bharat
Published: January 2025

The introduction draws attention to the paradoxical nature of the relationship between law and racial justice, highlighting how the law can be used to both help and hinder the struggle for racial justice. We might assume that the legal system will be allied to the idea of racial justice because it is said to be underpinned by the principles of neutrality and fairness, and there are various Acts of Parliament that appear to give effect to these principles such as the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010. However, there are examples of law failing to advance racial justice and sometimes facilitating racial injustices. The Introduction sets out the central contention of this book: that there are historical, cultural, and systemic reasons for the limits of law.
Racial Justice and Law: A Paradoxical Relationship
Authors: Malkani Bharat
Published: January 2025

This chapter sets out some definitional and conceptual issues. It defines the term racial justice and outlines six key concepts of Critical Race Theory that underpin the analysis in the rest of the book: structural racism, the social construction of race and racism, intersectionality, interest-convergence, lived theory, and the inherent limits of legal processes. It also outlines the problems with ubiquitous terms such as BAME, equality, diversity, and inclusion.
Racial Justice and Law: The Colonial Era
Authors: Malkani Bharat
Published: January 2025

This chapter is concerned with the use of law to create and perpetuate racial injustices during the era of the British Empire. It explores the use of law to justify and facilitate imperialism and colonial rule and to legitimize slavery. It considers how law was used to impose social control over indigenous populations and the ways in which law created the phenomenon of structural racism. In effect, a two-tiered legal system was created: one for those classed as White British, and another more disadvantageous system for those classed as something other than White British.
Antiracist Lawyering
Authors: Malkani Bharat
Published: January 2025

With the study of law’s relationship with racial justice in mind, this chapter draws on theories of antiracism and progressive lawyering to set out four principles for antiracist lawyering: reflection, creativity, collaboration, and accountability. It argues that lawyers who wish to promote racial justice should engage in reflection, should adopt creative approaches to lawyering, should collaborate, and should remain accountable to their clients.
Local Safety and Victimization Surveys as a Data Source for Evidence-Based Prevention Policies
Authors: Sangenís Marta Murrià , Garcés Cristina Sobrino , Riba José María López
Published: January 2025

Using crime data sources is crucial both for the implementation of evidence-based policies and for understanding crime and its patterns. Police recorded crimes have long been the main data source used by policy makers, as well as by researchers. However, police recorded crime data have also been subject to criticism due to the measurement error resulting, especially, from under-reporting. In response to this concern, victimization surveys are a reliable source of data to estimate crime in geographic areas. When the scope is local, surveys provide data for estimating crimes which take place at certain urban areas. While measuring and analysing crime patterns is a relevant topic, we argue that it is also essential for prevention policies to use data sources which provide information about feelings of security and community safety indicators. Local victimization surveys are one of the main data sources that address these topics. By reviewing long-standing and significant surveys which offer data at a local level, the chapter exposes how these surveys are a useful tool to support local and regional authorities in the design, implementation and evaluation of their prevention and security policies.
National Crime Surveys in the 21st Century
Authors: Mills Mark
Published: January 2025

To study and combat crime, we must first be able to accurately measure it. One of the primary means of measuring crime is the use of official records such as arrest records and records of crimes reported to police. However, official records do not provide a complete picture of crime because they fail to account for crime that goes unreported. To provide a more complete picture of crime, many nations have implemented crime victimization surveys. One of the largest and most influential of these is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) in the United States. This chapter will provide an overview of the strengths and limitations of national crime surveys, focusing specifically on the NCVS to highlight the rich research opportunities afforded by national crime surveys. The chapter will then address emerging challenges of conducting national crime surveys in an age of advanced technology, where many households no longer utilize land-line telephones, and household members instead utilize personal cell phones. Other challenges, along with unique opportunities, presented by technological advances will also be discussed.
Obscured by Its Omnipresence? Conceptual and Practical Issues around Measuring Alcohol-Related Crime in England and Wales
Authors: Lightowlers Carly , Bryant Lucy , Horsefield Olivia
Published: January 2025

Alcohol is commonly associated with crime; while never a sole cause, alcohol consumption can be a salient contributory factor, influencing aetiology, nature, severity and harms inflicted. Its impact varies across crime types, and its association with violent crime is known to be stronger than with other forms. Crucially, the harms arising from alcohol-related crime can be significant, and accurately identifying and measuring such incidents is a crucial step in understanding and addressing this. Yet defining and measuring alcohol-related crime is riddled with a range of conceptual and practical issues. Practically, for example, it is widely accepted that police often fail to record the presence of alcohol in incidents they engage with – particularly where an alcogenic environment (for example, night-time economy spaces) obscures alcohol’s role through its omnipresence. Conceptually, establishing alcohol’s role in any given incident is necessarily a subjective interpretation, and as such can be contested, affecting its measurement in crime statistics. Exploring these practical and conceptual issues, this chapter suggests alcohol’s widespread involvement in violent crime in particular renders it mundane and intractable, and its extent likely underestimated. It also discusses how the measurement of alcohol-related crime – and the unresolved issues with this – affects responses to it. Considering victimization and perpetrator surveys, as well as police recorded crime statistics, this chapter also reflects on ways to improve measurement practices to better understand the extent and nature of alcohol-related crime.
Measuring Attitudes from General-Purpose Surveys: A Pragmatic Approach for Criminology
Authors: Cunliffe Jack
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the importance of measuring attitudes accurately in criminology research, particularly in survey research. Issues of measurement often mean that subsequent analysis lacks clarity and datasets remain underused. The chapter argues that this does not need to be the case if appropriate consideration of the available questionnaire items, previous measurement methods and theoretical expectations are taken into consideration. To demonstrate this, theoretically and empirically informed reflexive measurement is applied to the England and Wales Offending, Crime and Justice Survey 2004 to 2006 to derive a measure of criminogenic propensity that aligns with existing individual-level attitudes that have been used in the criminological literature. The result is a measure with high face, content, predictive and construct validity derived from this underused data source by operationalizing a second-order latent variable that contains a range of questions that match, as closely as possible, against familiar measures of individual criminogenic propensity. This demonstrates an intuitive measurement framework based on the acknowledgement of the realism within measurement, followed by questioning what has previously been done from both a theoretical and empirical perspective, and asking how that can be reliably reproduced, given different items. Application of this approach to the measurement to other constructs is considered.
On the Use of Inferential Statistics on Administrative Police Data
Authors: Verlaan Tim , Langton Samuel
Published: January 2025

This chapter aims to spark a conversation about the use of inferential statistics when using administrative police data. Through a (mini) scoping review of eight recent issues of journals within the field of criminology and crime science, we observe that all but one of the examined studies employ inferential statistics without meeting the requirements for generalization. We identify a number of negative consequences of this, namely: wrongful suggestions of generalizability of the observed difference/effects; undervaluing of the observed difference/effects; and obscuring of observed difference/effects. We hypothesize three possible drivers of misuse of inferential statistics: uncritical application of statistical methods (aided by easy-to-use statistical packages); the need for greater generalizability and impact of research findings; and the need for normative judgements on observed differences. In response to these three identified contributing factors, we call for: a general caution of inferential approaches and subsequent revaluing of descriptive statistics when working with administrative police data, and the opening up of a debate around (the need for) making normative judgements. Furthermore, we echo the call of Gibbs et al – who diagnose similar problems in educational research – for academic (crime) journals to ‘adopt or revise standards to make the interpretation of inferential statistics and p-values, such as defining the intended inferred population, a required part of reporting in analytic methods sections’.
Bad Outcomes, Good Intentions: Approaching the Potential Misuse of Crime Data by Policy Makers
Authors: Castro-Toledo Francisco J. , Gómez-Bellvís Ana B.
Published: January 2025

Scientific research ethics are challenged today by the risk of misusing research results that could adversely affect or harm both individuals and their environment. In the ethics literature, such risks have been linked to the possibility of research results falling into the wrong hands, that is, for criminal or terrorist purposes. However, crime data misuse can also affect policy makers’ decisions and lead to discrimination, stigmatization, harassment and intimidation of citizens. From a two-fold perspective, this chapter examines the potential misuse of crime data caused by policy decisions: (1) outlining the ethical scope of potential misuses in European security research; and (2) proposing recommendations to minimize this risk based on a ‘Mutual Distrust Model’ between researchers and policy makers.
A Framework for Measuring the Quality of Police Recorded Cybercrime Data, Illustrated through a UK/USA Comparison
Authors: Correia-Hopkins Sara
Published: January 2025

The potential of administrative data to generate new insights and inform policy and practice is increasingly being explored by researchers and public authorities. The study of cybercrime is no exception, as for example, police recorded crime data can help to better understand repeat victimization trends, as well as crime and victimization trends within small geographies. These types of insight are key to determining what an adequate police response ‘on the ground’ should look like. However, the quality of these data has seldom been systematically analysed. Based on the author’s previous studies and a review of recent literature, this chapter illustrates a framework for assessing the quality of police recorded cybercrime data, by comparing the data collected in the UK by Action Fraud (AF) and the USA by the Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3). The strengths and limitations of these data are grouped into four themes, closely aligned with the quality dimensions widely used by statistical authorities including (1) relevance, (2) accuracy and reliability, (3) coherence and comparability and (4) accessibility and timeliness. This framework highlights the need for an intimate knowledge of the data collection mechanisms, to assess the quality of police recorded cybercrime data and make the most of its affordances. This chapter should therefore be useful to users of police recorded cybercrime data, beyond the AF/IC3 examples. Recommendations are made for data quality improvements, which will enable the production of better insights for crime prevention, investigation and victim support.