bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Power struggle in education policy change: the role of knowledge actors in structural reforms in Chile
Authors: Castillo-Canales Dante , González Díaz Javier
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the role that knowledge actors play in education policy reforms in a context characterised by the increasing participation and influence of external actors in education policy debates. Knowledge actors are defined as those who conduct traditional functions of scientific research and also translate evidence for policymaking. Our hypothesis states that strengthening the Chilean research and development (R&D) ecosystem between 2005 and 2015 allowed the emergence of new knowledge actors with the capacity to influence the design of education policies. In order to assess this hypothesis, we first analyse the sharp increase in R&D public funding occurring in Chile during that period, which notably expanded the number and quality of researchers and the capacity to produce research findings capable of potentially informing policymaking. Second, we analyse two education reforms. The first one, discussed in the initial years of the R&D expansion, was the Preferential Student Subsidy Law (2005–08); and the second one, the Inclusion Law (2014–15), was carried out after the increase in research capacity. We empirically analyse National Congress records that register the actors participating in public hearings to provide their professional expertise and opinions about the reforms. We find an abrupt increase in the participation of knowledge actors influencing policy debates in the second reform, as a result of the strengthening of the R&D ecosystem. We conclude that the state can benefit from the contribution made from a diverse and emergent array of knowledge actors that provide and mobilise evidence capable of better informing policy debates in education.
Agency and autonomy
Authors: Higgs Paul
Published: January 2023

This chapter draws attention to ideas of dependency and passivity and the major role that these have played in framing old age and later life. These ideas reflect the marginalised position of older people in society but also the fact that ageing is a corporeal experience of decline and loss. This framing of old age has historically been regarded as unproblematic which is why the concerns of the latter part of the life course have been seen as the province of health and social policy. However, by the end of the 20th century the nature of old age had changed considerably since retirement age became an almost universal experience in Western societies, and the most prosperous nations were now experiencing both increased life expectancy and increased disability free life expectancy. All of this transformed expectations and experiences of later life. This chapter utilizes therefore the notion of autonomy and agency to problematize the responses to ‘the problem of old age’, which range from personal adjustment, the extension of citizenship rights, and political and cultural engagement. This chapter argues that in and of itself these notions play a contradictory role that should not be reified into a decontextualized virtue free from criticism.
Sexuality and rights in later life
Authors: Willis Paul , Hafford-Letchfield Trish
Published: January 2023

The aim of this chapter is to identify through a critical lens the sexual and gendered discourses that restrict older adults’ sexual lives and limit recognition of sexual personhood in later life, and to discuss how these discourses filter into social work practice. This encompasses dominant discourses of ageism, heteronormativity, and erotic gerontophobia. In addition, this chapter provides an overview of theoretical approaches for understanding how these discourses impact on older men and women in differing ways (including queer perspectives, minority stress theory and lifecourse approaches), and explores ways of affirming and supporting the sexual rights of older adults through a rights-based lens, which includes rights to participate in sexual activities and practices; rights to self-define, claim and express individual identities, inclusive of LGB identities; and, rights recognised by public and social institutions, such as state recognition of sexual and intimate relationships. As such, this chapter draws attention to the implications of sexual personhood and sexual and gender identities within social work fields of practice, such as aged care and community care settings.
Assessment, care planning and decision making
Authors: Olaison Anna , Donnelly Sarah
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines the impact that practice models and assessment instruments have on social work interventions with older people within the context of the move towards a rights-based approach to care planning and supported decision-making. The chapter argues that the application of a critical gerontological lens is particularly important in a context of neoliberalism and scarce resources, where social workers are increasingly reliant on informal caregivers, mainly family members, to provide care and support to older people, creating challenges and ethical dilemmas in practice situations. The chapter explores how despite national and international legislative and policy advances in relation to older people and decision-making, paternalistic approaches are still often the norm. The exclusion of older people with a cognitive impairment or dementia from care planning meetings and decision-making will be critically examined including an analysis of power dynamics and systemic influences such as discharge planning pressures. The chapter concludes with a helpful checklist for students and practitioners on ‘Best Practices in Care Planning Meetings’ with older people.
Opportunities and future prospects for gerontological social work with a critical lens
Authors: Seppänen Marjaana , Ray Mo
Published: January 2023

This chapter reflects on themes and issues identified in previous chapters and draws attention to the lessons that could be drawn from critical gerontology. It also proposes the opportunities and future prospects for a critical gerontological social work that challenges dominant narratives about age and ageing, and the tendency towards proceduralised practice that characterises much social work with older people. The chapter urges social work practitioners, older people and researchers to contribute to debates which are at the moral heart of social work (for example, rights-based practice, working with complex needs, citizenship, discourses on autonomy, relational practice grounded in an ethic of care; care democracy; choice and self-management). The chapter concludes by proposing priorities for gerontological social work over the next decade.
Some conclusions
Authors: Bond Emma , Phippen Andy
Published: January 2023

In concluding, we bring together theoretical, legal and practice-based perspectives to consider how stakeholders with safeguarding responsibilities best respond to online risk based upon our experience of ‘what works’ and how vulnerable adults can have their best interests supported. Building on previous arguments, we consider the role of technology, such as filtering and monitoring in safeguarding, what works, when it can be empowering, and how it can be excessive. Providing a counter-narrative, we argue that there is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the safeguarding of vulnerable adults when it comes to online behaviours, and cognisance of their capacity issues, online risk, and risk mitigation are required. We conclude by reflecting once more on the foundations laid by the Cobb ruling and how we are at the genesis of both thinking and practice around adult online safeguarding.
Policing and stress
Authors: Cummins Ian
Published: January 2023

This chapter will examine the causes of and response to occupational stress that is inherent within modern policing. It identifies the potential causes of stress that are embedded in the policing role. Some of these relate to the nature of the work. For example, it is clear that responding to traumatised people who have been victims of violence or investigating sexual offences will inevitably impact on professionals carrying out this work. Alongside this, in common with other public sector professionals, police officers feel overwhelmed by the bureaucratic demands that come with the role. There is a growing literature that challenges these engrained notions and seeks to develop services to respond to them. Police forces increasingly recognise that the welfare and wellbeing of staff is a priority
Framing Welfare Conditionality
Authors: Marston Greg , Humpage Louise , Peterie Michelle , Mendes Philip , Bielefeld Shelley , Staines Zoe
Published: January 2023

The first chapter places the Australian and New Zealand cases of conditional welfare in an historical and comparative global context. The chapter traces the intellectual and political foundations of welfare conditionality, and its various manifestations in a range of countries, particularly the Anglosphere welfare states that have a high degree of convergence around poverty governance. The chapter also outlines the theoretical lens that is used to analyse and understand welfare conditionality in Australia and New Zealand. Here we draw on theories of human agency, social identity and autonomy and social justice frameworks as developed by a range of scholars that acknowledge the intersections between redistribution, recognition and representation in policy development, welfare administration, and sociolegal studies.
Procedural, Consumer And Contractual Rights, And Access To Justice
Authors: Marston Greg , Humpage Louise , Peterie Michelle , Mendes Philip , Bielefeld Shelley , Staines Zoe
Published: January 2023

The chapter examines social policy and the law, both in terms of social security law that facilitates income management and administrative law as it pertains to citizen redress and review. Analysis of the legal restrictions imposed through compulsory income management in Australia and New Zealand is needed to ascertain the extent to which the autonomy of welfare recipients is impacted and how this affects consumer choices. In Australia, compulsory income management has required that managed funds be spent at government approved retailers on legislatively defined ‘priority needs’. An under-examined aspect of compulsory income management is therefore the constraints it places on the contractual capacity of welfare recipients subject to it and how this relates to structural equity barriers. The chapter explores how law can impact the relationships between citizens and what factors are considered by lawmakers in determining whether some people are worthy of being accorded the same citizenship rights as others, thereby drawing attention to the distribution of burdens and benefits in administrative justice. Methods of analysis include participant interviews reflections on procedural rights and review, critical analysis of relevant legislation, and legislative instruments in Australia and New Zealand.
Resistance And Reform: Individual And Collective Agency
Authors: Marston Greg , Humpage Louise , Peterie Michelle , Mendes Philip , Bielefeld Shelley , Staines Zoe
Published: January 2023

The chapter highlights individual and collective resistance to the material restrictions associated with ‘being on the card’. Resistance can occur through formal and informal channels, and it can be overt or covert as the participant interviews highlight. The sense of shame of ‘being on the card’ sometimes resulted in avoidance of public spaces and commercial settings where the devalued identity of being a ‘welfare recipient’ would be more visible to others. Other forms of resistance discussed in the chapter include attempting to circumvent income quarantining, such as buying approved goods with the card and selling them for cash. Covert resistance like this was perceived by participants as less risky than ‘overt resistance’ in the form of trading public protests, direct advocacy and coordinated campaigns. This chapter traces the public campaigns and policy activism, both off-line and online that have sought to change the policy settings. Interviews with community stakeholders from different trial sites are drawn upon to examine the effectiveness of ongoing campaigns and advocacy to have the compulsory income management trials halted.
Interpreting the data
Authors: Drew Michael
Published: January 2023

Chapter 4 provides a comparative quantitative analysis of Ireland with the largest economies in Europe (EU15), drawing on EU and OECD surveys for food poverty and UN for food insecurity. The chapter also builds on existing quantitative research to provide an updated analysis of food poverty in Ireland, using the latest secondary data available. This analysis explores the characteristics of those experiencing food poverty in Ireland and considers factors that may predict food poverty.
Investigating the policy drivers
Authors: Drew Michael
Published: January 2023

Chapter 7 considers key social policy areas influencing food poverty in Ireland. It reflects back on the themes introduced in the literature review and assesses each area in the light of the results of analysing the research data. The discussion is informed by both the literature, the secondary analysis and the evidence from the interviews with food bank users.
A Beginner's Guide to Building Better Worlds
Authors: Gahman Levi , Mohamed Nasha , Penados Filiberto , Reyes Johannah-Rae , Mohamed Atiyah , Smith Shelda-Jane
Published: January 2023

This ambitious book offers radical alternatives to conventional ways of thinking about the planet’s most pressing challenges, ranging from alienation and exploitation to state violence and environmental ruin. The book introduces readers to the Zapatistas, an autonomous social movement comprised of rebel Indigenous communities, who arguably represent one of the world’s foremost examples of revolutionary struggle and what it means to rage against the colonial-capitalist machine for freedom, justice and democracy. Bridging real-world examples of resistance, mutual aid, food sovereignty, self-determination and holistic approaches to health with big-picture concepts such as critical consciousness, social reproduction, alternative economies and decolonisation, the authors encourage readers to view themselves as co-creators of the societies they are part of, by ‘being Zapatistas wherever they are’. The book also aspires to unsettle mainstream education’s neoliberal status quo by arming readers with crucial insights about the merits of political education, praxis, solidarity and collective action, all of which are necessary towards challenging institutionalised authority, confronting taken-for-granted systems of power and changing realities. Written by a diverse intercontinental team of first-generation graduates, the book ultimately offers readers an emancipatory set of anti-colonial ideas related to both refusing liberal bystanding and collectively constructing better worlds.
Introduction: from liberal bystanding to emancipatory praxis
Authors: Gahman Levi , Smith Shelda-Jane , Penados Filiberto , Mohamed Nasha , Reyes Johannah-Rae , Mohamed Atiyah
Published: January 2023

The Introduction provides readers with an overview of the significance and merits of political education. Drawing from a variety of different sources of revolutionary thought and emancipatory action, in particular the work of the anti-colonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon, the chapter casts light on the pressing need for education that is explicitly political, and prioritises the development of critical consciousness and collective action. It also introduces readers to the concept of liberal bystanding, and details the pitfalls of individualism, repercussions of falling in line with the status quo, and making the choice to refrain from engaging in solidarity and political struggle.
A world where many worlds fit
Authors: Gahman Levi , Smith Shelda-Jane , Penados Filiberto , Mohamed Nasha , Reyes Johannah-Rae , Mohamed Atiyah
Published: January 2023

Chapter 2 offers readers a detailed introduction to the Zapatistas and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN). It provides a genealogy of the Zapatista uprising in 1994, as well as expanding on how the movement continues to engage in resistance and is practising self-determination in the face of neoliberalism and authoritarian state power. The chapter also discusses some of the principles that define the Zapatista movement by moving into an explicatory overview of several axioms that characterise the spirit and praxis of the Zapatistas, including ‘preguntando caminamos’ (‘asking, we walk’); ‘para todos todo, para nosotros nada’ (‘everything for everyone, nothing for us’); ‘un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos’ (‘a world where many worlds fit’); and ‘no están solos’ (‘you are not alone’).
Political education and radical pedagogy
Authors: Gahman Levi , Smith Shelda-Jane , Penados Filiberto , Mohamed Nasha , Reyes Johannah-Rae , Mohamed Atiyah
Published: January 2023

Chapter 7 illustrates how Zapatista communities are placing dignity, collectivity, defiance and selflessness at the heart of their social relations, economy and autonomous education system. The chapter offers an insight into the genesis of the Zapatista rebellion along with a detailed overview of how grassroots political education operates in Zapatista communities. After historicising the EZLN’s uprising in 1994, the chapter demonstrates how Indigenous customs and cosmovision remain at the heart of the movement’s resistance and education system. The chapter then highlights the ways in which being engaged with nature, active learning and political history are featured in the curriculum. Overall, the chapter provides readers with an overview of how the Zapatistas have incorporated political education, solidarity, collective action, democratic process and praxis into their construction of autonomy.
Health, food sovereignty, solidarity economies
Authors: Gahman Levi , Smith Shelda-Jane , Penados Filiberto , Mohamed Nasha , Reyes Johannah-Rae , Mohamed Atiyah
Published: January 2023

Chapter 9 describes how the Zapatistas are building an alternative solidarity economy that incorporates mutual aid, food sovereignty, Indigenous knowledge and organic agroecology as a response to the deleterious products of global capitalism and the corporate food regime. The chapter also provides a critique of orthodox approaches to global health, and shares with readers information about the disparate physical and mental health effects that were and remain a product of colonial power, capitalist social relations and Eurocentric worldviews. On this point, it underscores the transformative potential of Indigenous knowledges and approaches to care, health and wellbeing. In detailing the Zapatistas’ construction of autonomy and decommodisation of nature, it also includes several insights into what principles are incorporated into and are at the foundation of a solidarity economy.
A battle for the soul of education
Authors: Gahman Levi , Smith Shelda-Jane , Penados Filiberto , Mohamed Nasha , Reyes Johannah-Rae , Mohamed Atiyah
Published: January 2023

Chapter 10 ends with a reflection on the current challenges at hand regarding mainstream higher education and universities, as well as the authors’ thoughts on some potential solutions, which draw directly from the spirit of Zapatismo. As a summary chapter, it provides readers with an overview of how the Zapatistas have prioritised political education, social reproduction, solidarity, collective action, democratic process and praxis in their resistance, movement and pursuit of health. The chapter also reiterates the point that the book should ultimately be a gateway text that motivates readers to refuse liberal bystanding and contribute to collective action and radical change wherever they are, from the local to the global, that is relevant, inclusive and enduring.
Using digital technologies in social justice research
Authors: Smith Rob , Duckworth Vicky , Tuckett Alan
Published: January 2023

Chapter 3 will focus on our use of digital technologies when researching with a methodological approach centred on social justice and in the sharing of our participants’ stories. We provide an overview of the way the project used video (recording and editing), the website and a Twitter account to gather data but also to share it and to broaden the impact of the research with a democratic interactive digital platform. The website in particular we see as facilitating the co-production of a ‘third space’ in which further and adult education can be collectively reimagined by the staff and students who constitute it.
Transformative teaching and learning and social justice
Authors: Smith Rob , Duckworth Vicky , Tuckett Alan
Published: January 2023

In Chapter 5, we address the contested meaning of social justice and go on to develop our thinking about transformative teaching and learning and how it connects with a range of connected issues. We explore how the academic/vocational divide in education feeds social division and inequality and further and adult education’s role in reifying as well as challenging that. Drawing on participants’ stories we explore how further and adult education offers a unique and cohesive space in which people from different ethnic backgrounds can forge in-between/hybrid identities in relation to people of other different backgrounds. We also reframe the concept of social mobility through participants’ stories and show how further and adult education can offer hope and benefit mental health and well-being for people caught up in difficult and potentially binding socio-economic circumstances.
Climate justice, social policy and the transition to net zero in the UK
Authors: Snell Matthew , Scott Kirsten , Jenkins Kelli , Kennedy Harriet , Thomson Komali , Yenneti Helen , Stockton Ian
Published: January 2023

Climate change is both global in scope and unprecedented in scale and has been described by the UN as ‘the defining issue of our time’. There has been scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change for some time, with the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirming that it is ‘unequivocal’ that human activity has warmed the atmosphere, land and oceans. There is also substantial evidence surrounding the impacts of climate change, with evidence of it already ‘disrupting national economies and affecting lives’. Climate change threatens food, water and energy security and poses acute risks to lives and livelihoods through extreme weather events, especially heatwaves, droughts, cyclones and sea level rise.
Care as Practice and Ethic
Authors: Davis Juliet
Published: January 2023

As outlined in the introductory chapter, care is a word that has evolved substantially over time, gathering different meanings and associations. These subtly vary depending on whether care is used as noun, a verb or an adjective. Adding complexity, care can denote a disposition, as in ‘caring about’ something, someone or an issue. But care also denotes a wider set of activities, as in ‘caring for’ a person, collective or thing in a practical sense (Noddings, 1984; Fine, 2006). Both meanings of care can of course be, and often are, interlinked within single uses of the word. In the early days of writing this chapter, I was reading to my young son The Lorax by Dr. Seuss (1971). It is a story of a tree species being exploited almost to extinction, with those involved in deriving economic benefit from it failing to comprehend its crucial importance for the health of a biodiverse ecosystem. Finally, at the end, once that ecosystem has been all but destroyed and the economy is on its knees too, a little boy who learns the story from former industrialist the Once-Ler and is given the last remaining seeds of the tree is motivated to plant them and take care of the emerging seedlings. The recovery of the landscape will depend, the Once-Ler tells him, melancholy with hindsight, on people like him caring ‘a whole awful lot,’ with the word care denoting both a disposition of deep concern about the damaged state of the world and the vast labour of care that would be required to make it a better place again. In an age when children across the world, inspired by Greta Thunberg, are taking on these sorts of labours of care for the environment for the sake of their own and their children’s futures, the story is no longer prophetic as it would have been in the early 1970s but rather reads as a commentary on the state of contemporary action against climate change.
Openness and the Unfolding of Care
Authors: Davis Juliet
Published: January 2023

Over the last three chapters, we have looked at different ways in which urban design shapes care practices and relations, and considered how it can do so for the good and in ways reflective of an ethics of care. In this chapter, I move on to consider how it can attend to the ways in which care needs evolve through time. As Sophia Bowlby (2012) puts it, taking a long-term view of care reveals how ‘our need for physical care varies through the lifecourse, from the physical dependence of the child to the physical competence of the adult, and the growing physical and sometimes mental dependence of people as they age’. As care needs change, of course, we can understand the practices that attend to them as also being in flux, continually changing. How they change, in turn, as I briefly discussed in Chapter 2, has implications for the spaces, infrastructures, technologies and materials that care practice enrols and requires in different circumstances and contexts. Here, I build on that discussion, asking about the strategies that urban design might develop in attending to the unfolding and transformation of needs for care over different stages of the lifecourse. Picking up on the quote above by the Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi, it asks about the forms of openness in urban design that might allow people to change their lifestyles within place.
Framing Waste
Authors: Hird Myra J.
Published: January 2023

Chapter 2 focuses on how waste becomes (or does not become) a public issue. Through a number of direct examples, this chapter shows that waste does not (necessarily or even most often) present itself as a self-evident problem. Indeed, it takes work to transform waste from a material object into a public issue and sustain public interest.
Spatializing Marcuse
Authors: Walker Margath
Published: January 2023

In spite of calls for resistance among geographers and social scientists, Herbert Marcuse, one of the foremost theorists of opposition, has not been taken up widely in recent years. In response, Spatializing Marcuse: Critical theory for contemporary times, offers the first sustained attempt to foreground Herbert Marcuse’s work within geographical debates. The central argument of the book is that an adaptation and extension of Marcuse’s philosophies provide the tools from individual to societal scales to overturn the status quo. This Marcusean-inspired geography offers a strategically constructed blueprint to retrieve elements of a critical revolutionary subjectivity. It does so first by demonstrating the theoretical potential of spatializing Marcuse’s work, and second, by showing how social change has been stifled. Operating both conceptually and empirically, Spatializing Marcuse mobilizes Marcuse’s theories by unmooring them from their original spaces of engagement. Marcuse is applied to a broad range of examples such as contemporary geopolitics, digital infrastructure, immigration, and issues of resistance demonstrating how Marcusean philosophies are important to resisting contemporary capitalism. In the process, the uses of Critical Theory in the context of the real world are elucidated. Ultimately, Spatializing Marcuse challenges the way we think about space and politics through a fresh philosophical perspective that points towards new directions to overturn the status quo.
Dimensionality Flattened
Authors: Walker Margath A.
Published: January 2023

Chapter 2 explains how the status quo maintains its grip on society through the spatial containment of social change. First, the chapter lays out three broad and interrelated concepts. Instrumental reason looks at how reason is enlisted in ever more pervasive networks of administrative discipline and control. One-dimensionality examines the slow process of quieting dissent, along with the implementation of conformity through economic and psychological means. Technological rationality goes beyond technology as an agglomeration of mere technical devices to explore the process wherein domination is rationalized. The chapter then applies these abstract concepts to concrete examples by drawing on real-world occurrences such as the geopolitics of bordering and recent US political events.
Reimagining the Inquest
Authors: Kirton-Darling Edward
Published: January 2023

This chapter concludes the discussion, drawing together threads from the preceding chapters. It reflects on policy and potential future directions of the inquest, including funding for lawyers for the bereaved, the local nature of the inquest service and understandings of the meaning of kinship at the inquest. It concludes with reflections on academic scholarship and conceptual questions about kinship, death and the inquest process, including the ways in which practices play a central role in producing kinship in the inquest process.
Resisting AI
Authors: McQuillan Dan
Published: January 2023

This book is a call to resist AI. The operations of deep learning cause collateral damage in ways that can’t be fixed, and its take-up by institutions increases social precarity and structural violence. Instead of helping to address our current crises, AI produces states of exception that determine people’s life chances, becoming part of fascistic solutions to social problems. The book sets out an anti-fascist approach to AI that replaces computational exclusions with feminist matters of care. It proposes a programme of workers’ and people’s councils as a way to restructure AI according to principles of mutual aid and solidarity. By prioritizing the commons over abstract optimization, the book outlines a new apparatus that would help us to adapt to our changing times by supporting social autonomy.
Collateral Damage
Authors: McQuillan Dan
Published: January 2023

This chapter looks at the surprising brittleness of AI and the way its reliance on proxies and shortcuts haunts its social application. It critiques the post-hoc attempts to ‘fix’ AI’s damaging effects through ethics, regulation or human intervention, and focuses on the way AI not only produces discrimination but intensifies existing structural injustice. The chapter closes by looking at the way the performative character of AI produces the very subjects of its judgements, and at the inherently backward-looking nature of its solutionism. The result is deemed to be a recipe for ‘AI Realism’.
Necropolitics
Authors: McQuillan Dan
Published: January 2023

This chapter looks at the impacts of AI under conditions of social crisis. It describes the way AI acts as an algorithmic shock doctrine, becoming an apparatus for producing states of exception. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic prefigure the algorithmic distribution of life chances, where AI acts as a necropolitical technology. The chapter explores the origins of AI’s mathematical optimizations in the history of eugenics, and its legacy in the search for superior intelligence. It identifies the steps by which AI may become, through ultrarationalism and neoreaction, a part of a fascistic politics. Chapter 4 closes by looking at AI’s potential enrolment in fascistic responses to the climate crisis.
People’s Councils
Authors: McQuillan Dan
Published: January 2023

Chapter 6 takes the ethics of Chapter 5 and turns them into political tactics through the principles of mutual aid and solidarity. Algorithmic boundaries and enclosures are challenged by a commitment to commonality. The struggles of workers ‘above’ and ‘below’ the algorithm are put in relation to the potential of the workers’ council, a directly democratic form of organizing that is a starting point for structural renewal. This is extended to the idea of the people’s council as a self-constituting struggle against abstract segregation. Resistance to AI is compared to the historical movement of Luddism and the need for community constraint of harmful technology. The overall approach is anti-fascist, in that it is both an early recognition of the intensity of the threat and a defence of the space for emancipation.
Anti-fascist AI
Authors: McQuillan Dan
Published: January 2023

Chapter 7 lays out the way an anti-fascist approach to AI moves from resistance to restructuring. It shows, by example, why an anti-fascist approach must be both decolonial and feminist. The anti-fascist goal of structural renewal is discussed in terms of socially useful production, solidarity economies and the centrality of commons, such that optimization is replaced by commonization. Chapter 7 closes by outlining a new apparatus, one that resonates with a renewed vision of the social. While it may or may not use advanced computation, a new apparatus will support a transition to social autonomy. In place of AI as we know it, the recursive horizontality of a new apparatus is open and adaptive. Rather than trying to ‘solve’ anything, it helps to sustain care under radically changing conditions.
White But Not Quite
Authors: Kalmar Ivan
Published: January 2023

Since the ‘migration crisis’ of 2016, long-simmering tensions between the Western members of the European Union and its ‘new’ Eastern members – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary – have proven to be fertile ground for rebellion against liberal values and policies.In this startling and original book Ivan Kalmar argues that Central Europe illiberalism is a misguided response to the devastating effects of global neoliberalism which arose from the area’s brutal transition to capitalism in the 1990s.Kalmar argues that dismissive attitudes towards ‘Eastern Europeans’ in the EU as incapable of real democracy are a form of racism, and connected to recent racist attacks on migrants from the area to the West.He explores the close relation between racism towards Central Europeans and racism by Central Europeans: a people white, but not quite.
How Central Europeans Became Central European (Time and Time Again)
Authors: Kalmar Ivan
Published: January 2023

‘Central Europe’ is a concept that has been repeatedly invented and reinvented. It was a German idea at first, but was later adopted by peoples living between Germany and Russia. All of the various reinventions of Central Europe have tried to make Central Europe central to Europe. They have pictured the area as capable of providing a Third Way between East and West. Yet at the same time, they have presented Central Europe as destined to defend true Western values against the dangers of the East, forgotten by a complacent West.
Imitators Spurned: Why the West Needs Central Europe to Stay in its Eastern European Place
Authors: Kalmar Ivan
Published: January 2023

As the West extended its political and economic system to the former communist countries, Western multinational corporations were not looking for new, equal partners, but for cheap labour and new markets, much as in the postcolonial areas of the Global South. Illiberalism in the area has been a misguided reaction to this fact, rather than an internal failure due to the cultural inability of ‘Eastern Europeans’ to ‘imitate’ liberal democracy, as the authors Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes suggest. This chapter relates the partial and limited integration into the West of ‘white but not quite’ Central Europe, to the limited acceptance of colonial elites as ‘the same but not quite’, discussed in the 1990s by Homi Bhabha.
‘We Will Not Be a Colony!’
Authors: Kalmar Ivan
Published: January 2023

This chapter continues to examine parallels between post-colonial and post-communist economies. In both, the local economy is dependent on the former colonial powers of the West. I discuss here the competition between internationally-connected ‘elites’ and ‘national capitalists’ who rely heavily on politicians and other local connections. The ‘national capitalists’ have borrowed the analysis of post-communist societies as similar to post-colonial ones from the Left. But when Central Europeanilliberals cry, ‘We will not be a colony!’ (as they have increasingly done since the 2008 financial crisis), it is far from a proclamation of solidarity with the Global South and its colonial past. On the contrary, it is the expression of injured pride for being treated ‘like a colony’. It is meant to reinforce the perceived barrier between themselves as white nations on one hand, and the non-Europeans on the other.
Slavia Prague v. Glasgow Rangers: Lessons from a Football Match
Authors: Kalmar Ivan
Published: January 2023

This chapter uses racism in football as a case study to reinforce the general conclusions of the book. Football racism in Central Europe is quite striking, but not as much as in some other Eastern European countries. Yet incidents of football racism in Central Europe are often described as typically ‘Eastern European’, while very similar incidents in the West are never generalized as ‘Western European’. Criticizing racism in Central European football is urgently necessary, but projecting racism eastward by pretending that it is radically different from the liberal West is ill-advised.
Introduction
Authors: Casson Catherine , Rössner Philipp Robinson
Published: January 2023

Five functions are relevant to the evolution of capitalism: entrepreneurship, finance, management, workers, political leaders. This chapter proposes that the transition to capitalism, as associated with the ability for firms to enter and exit the market, to pool finance from multiple individuals, and to operate in a political and legal framework with input from the population, was connected to the emergence of each distinctive function.Functions that were initially combined gradually separated into the five categories across the 13th to the 20th century. Entrepreneurship was one of the first to emerge as a distinctive feature, in the 14th century. Finance emerged as a distinct function in the late 17th century while management became more specialised in the mid-19th. Workers began to assume a more independent identity in the mid-18th century. The close connection between politics and business reduced in Britain in c.1750, but remained significant in other locations.
Regulating Capitalism
Authors: Rössner Philipp Robinson
Published: January 2023

Since its medieval beginnings, in modern capitalism markets have tended to be ordered and regulated, and this usually helped economic development. Starting with the Scholastic Heritage my chapter focuses on select aspects of market regulation that kept reoccurring, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, and the role that political economy assigned to governments intervening with the aim of strengthening markets and improving market performance. My aim is not so much to emphasise continuity over historical change. To the historian everything changes, all the time. Rather I would draw attention to recurring strategies of economic order that continued to shape capitalism, from the twelfth century to the present day. I focus on three specific areas of intervention: (1) monetary regulation, i.e. governance of coins, currency and financial markets; (2) industrial policy, and (3) urban market regulation, Modern capitalism built on strategies of economic order that had been invented, applied and modified centuries before modern capitalism even came to exist. This calls in question notions of earlier “medieval” market morality; if medieval forms of market regulation survived into the modern period, we also need to change our narratives of capitalism, morality and economic order altogether. A longue durée view certainly helps.
Capitalism and the Environment
Authors: Jones Geoffrey
Published: January 2023

Capitalist industry since the Industrial Revolution resulted in enormous productivity increases, wealth creation and sustenance as Earth’s population soared. Yet the business system as it emerged described the impact on the natural environment as “externalities,” and took little responsibility for them. The result was growing ecological damage, which persisted despite warnings by philosophers and scientists. The results were cumulative, and were magnified from the 1980s as non-Western countries such as China experienced fast economic growth. While most studies of this phenomenon have focused on policy and regulation, this chapter is concerned with the entrepreneurs who believed that for-profit businesses could facilitate sustainability rather than decimate it. They were marginal figures, and often considered eccentric, like the followers of Rudolf Steiner, but they achieved considerable innovations. In contrast, the growth of mainstream corporate sustainability in recent decades represents a commodification of environmentalism that has turned sustainability into a code for greenwashing.
Intersectionality and Criminology: Uncomfortable Bedfellows?
Authors: Healy Jane
Published: January 2023

Originating in the work of Crenshaw, in her ground-breaking feminist research on the multiple forms of discrimination and oppression experienced by African-American women (1991), intersectionality is more than a ‘buzzword’ of feminist researchers (Davis, 2008). Rather, contemporary researchers have utilized an intersectional approach to explore oppression not simply on the basis of gender and race but also of other sources of discrimination and oppression, such as class, sexual orientation and ability. This chapter charts the development of intersectionality, from the work of Black critical race scholars in the US to its global embrace within feminist academic literature and research. Within criminology, intersectionality is surprisingly late to embracing its utility, yet applying intersectionality advocates for a consideration of the multiple, intersecting layers of oppression or subordination, demonstrating how the impact and experiences of crime, deviance, social harm and inequalities can vary. Its approach to researching minority groups offers much to our constructions and interpretations of the meaning and consequences of multiple, structured and overlapping categories of identity, difference and disadvantage. This chapter provides the foundation for future sections to demonstrate how much intersectionality offers to contemporary criminological fields.
Navigating Constructions of the ‘Ideal Victim’ among Men Who Experience Childhood DVA and Gang Involvement
Authors: Levell Jade
Published: January 2023

In this chapter, intersectionality is applied to the life-history narratives of men who had experienced various forms of childhood adversity, including domestic violence and abuse (DVA), and later becoming ‘on-road’ and gang-involved. In the context of DVA, applying intersectionality allows us to see that for many families domestic violence can be one of a number of forms of abuse shaping family life. Intersectional analysis demonstrates how the experiences of DVA are amplified by further structural victimization. By looking at the childhood experience of marginalized black and mixed-race men who experienced DVA in childhood, this chapter explores the way in which different intersections affect the construction of masculinity, which thus impacts the way in which young people are constructed as victims (or not). This chapter offers a unique perspective on people whose experience of victimization through DVA is complicated by the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, class and criminality.
Introduction: Feminist Resistance In Russia
Authors: Perheentupa Inna
Published: January 2023

In this chapter, motivations for studying feminism in neoconservative Russia are set out. The author argues that it is highly instructive to study feminist activism in Russia, not only for those engaged with Russia, but also for global readers more widely. The case challenges the hegemony of Western feminism, and illustrates how a conservative and authoritarian context moulds feminism. The author explains the rationale for a broad approach to politics involving both covert and overt resistance, as politics in Russia has often been narrowly understood as the privilege of a restricted elite. After introducing the other key thread of the book, that of movement resources and how their shortage affects the movement, the author argues that it is necessary to study resistance in this context from a spatial perspective as well, especially as it regards activists who are non-male and in some cases non-heterosexual. The research material produced in St Petersburg and Moscow, and key methodological choices connected with feminist ethnography are explicated.
Civic Activism And Feminist Politics In Russia
Authors: Perheentupa Inna
Published: January 2023

In this chapter the reader is provided with the necessary background to and history of civic activism and feminist politics in Russia. The author first introduces five key historical phases of Russian civic activism relevant to studying feminist activism in contemporary Russia. This is followed by discussion of the history of feminist and gender politics in Russia, which addresses the first feminists (ravnopraviki), the Soviet reorganization of gender relations, Stalin’s declaration that the ‘woman question’ had been solved, the Soviet underground feminist group Maria, and the women’s movement that emerged during perestroika and flourished following the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Finally, the author walks the reader through more recent political developments in Russia in the 2000s that have contributed to the rise of the contemporary feminist movement.
Activists Negotiating the Politics of Space
Authors: Perheentupa Inna
Published: January 2023

In this chapter the spatialities and temporalities of feminist activism are investigated, in light of diminished space for activism in increasingly authoritarian Russia. The reader is introduced to various locales of feminism in order to concretize the spatial realities of feminism, such as the constant lack of privacy and spaces of their own, and the spillover nature of the movement. Three key spatial metaphors for feminism – underground, street and shelter – and their wider implications are uncovered. With the help of these, the author illustrates how the activists negotiate spatial axes such as visible/invisible, public/private, closed/open and safe/unsafe. Two spatio-temporal dimensions of feminist politics are identified: that of expanding feminist space and discourses in society in the long run, and, more urgently, producing collective shelter and privacy for those who lack these. The concept of the politics of sheltering coined in the chapter refers particularly to the second dimension.
Epistemic Resources And Struggles
Authors: Perheentupa Inna
Published: January 2023

In this chapter, various types of epistemic resources for the movement are examined. By uncovering the different knowledge resources and how they connect with struggles within the feminist movement, the author suggests that feminism is becoming a politics of expertise. This concept focuses on feminist struggles over who and what kind of knowledge legitimize the adoption of a feminist subjectivity and the position of a feminist expert, thus raising the question of whose perspective counts. In connection with this, hierarchies and classed dimensions of feminism are also revealed. The author argues that the question of expertise is apposite beyond the Russian context, as more and more feminist knowledge is being produced outside traditional realms of feminism such as universities, for example in the various expanding digital spaces. However, it is suggested that the fact that the movement’s work focuses on knowledge dissemination undoubtedly augments the struggles over the correct epistemic resources.