bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Co-creation: the new kid on the block in public governance
Authors: Ansell Christopher , Torfing Jacob
Published: January 2025

This chapter has three objectives. The first is to show that while co-production was originally tied to service production, co-creation has broader applications in the field of public governance and involves a broader range of actors and activities. The second objective is to demonstrate how the co-creation concept both builds on and extends the concept of collaborative governance, thus adding new dimensions to an already well-established literature. The final objective is to show how a strategic turn to co-creation introduces a new type of ‘generative governance’ aimed at solving complex problems by constructing platforms enabling the formation of arenas for co-creation that bring together a plethora of public and private actors, including citizens, in creative problem-solving processes. The three objectives are achieved through prospective theoretical analysis aimed at providing a conceptual foundation for analysing cutting-edge societal developments that are not yet commonplace.
Co-creation in action: lessons from the CoSIE project
Authors: Geelhoed Sandra , Heijmans Eva
Published: January 2025

The chapter describes what is meant by co-creation as an innovative approach to service innovation and relates this approach to other innovative developments both in social work practice, policy-making and governance. The focus is on the ‘how’ of co-creation and we present a road map to co-creation and innovation in public services, which was one of the outcomes of the Co-creation of Service Innovation in Europe (CoSIE) project. This has some interesting crossovers with innovative social work methods and reflections in social work field, for instance related to community development, the capability approach, the valorisation of experiential knowledge and (social) dignity.
Methodology: exploring contextualised constructions of youth justice policy
Authors: Case Stephen
Published: January 2025

The methodology chapter outlines how the overarching project aims are pursued through a series of objectives, framed as targeted research questions unpacking how youth justice ‘policy’ and policy making is understood, re/constructed, experienced and made meaningful by policy makers working in different contexts. The questions also explore the barriers, challenges, enablers and opportunities for youth justice policy making and how youth justice policy making could be improved. The chapter explores how the research methodology and analyses adopted are necessarily qualitative, contextualised and ethnomethodological to enable examination of how policy is produced through processes of social interaction. The two-track methodology of qualitative documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews is then presented, alongside the central inclusion criterion of relevance to the political/policy and legislative period from 1996 to the present. Policy literature is broadly defined in this project as government legislation/policy and grey and non-governmental literature, while the interview sample consists of key stakeholders from the youth justice sector who are ‘experts by experience’ due to working in professional policy-making contexts during the analysis period.
The centrality of relationships in youth justice policy making
Authors: Case Stephen
Published: January 2025

Chapter 7extrapolates previous findings by scrutinising the constructive influence of relationships in shaping dynamic policy-making identities in different contexts. It begins with a discussion of the power dynamics shaped by organisational and individual identity and agenda as influencing the nature of relational policy making, thereafter focusing on the relational contexts occupied by the Youth Justice Board in their policy-making relationships with governmental actors (UK and Welsh Governments, ministers, civil servants) and non-governmental actors (His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation, Welsh professionals, practitioners). What follows is a detailed exploration of the relational (relationship-based) contexts and mechanisms that are seen to shape collaborative policy making, particularly through power dynamics within and between governmental and non-governmental policy-making organisations in the Youth Justice System seeking common ground within collaborative policy-making relationships, utilising communication to build collaborative relationships and relational reciprocity promoting equitable, supportive policy-making relationships.
Social justice
Authors: McLean Anton
Published: January 2025

This chapter argues for a more socially just situation for disadvantaged students. It is observed that properly defining the terms of educational inclusion is an important start in this endeavour. The chapter discusses the justice arguments espoused by the noted philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Rawls. It is observed that while there is merit in both of these approaches, they may still represent a denial of justice. The chapter discusses why purely distributive approaches may be insufficient to achieve social justice. It is argued that the work of Iris Marion Young and her five faces of oppression – exploitation; marginalisation; powerlessness; cultural imperialism; and violence – is an important framework which can be used to bring about a more socially just position for disadvantaged students.
Poetry in the higher education landscape
Authors: Illingworth Sam , Jack Kirsten
Published: January 2025

Chapter 1 introduces the transformative potential of poetry within higher education, exploring its benefits across various disciplines. It discusses overcoming challenges in integrating poetry, supported by practical strategies and diverse case studies. This chapter sets the stage for understanding how poetry can enrich teaching and learning experiences, advocating for a holistic, emotionally intelligent approach to higher education.
Poetry as assessment
Authors: Illingworth Sam , Jack Kirsten
Published: January 2025

Chapter 3 presents poetry as a tool for authentic assessment in higher education. It explores designing poetry assessments, providing feedback, and addressing challenges and barriers in this context. The chapter emphasises the value of poetry in enhancing reflective practices and emotional intelligence among students, supporting a more comprehensive understanding of subject matter.
Epilogue
Authors: Illingworth Sam , Jack Kirsten
Published: January 2025

Chapter 6 serves as an epilogue, reflecting on the poetic journey in higher education. It evaluates the impact of poetic approaches, adjusting methodologies, and sustaining momentum. The chapter discusses the future of poetry in higher education and offers final reflections on integrating poetry into teaching and learning.
Studying Political Parties as Organizations
Authors: Husted Emil
Published: January 2025

This book represents an attempt to convince organization scholars that political parties constitute interesting and relevant study objects. Organization scholars have always been interested in questions of power and politics, leading many to conduct fascinating analyses of social movements and activist networks, but the detailed study of political parties has for some reason been consistently neglected. To remedy this shortcoming, the book outlines four distinct perspectives on party organization: the classical, the configurational, the comparative and the cultural. While the first three perspectives are well-established within political science, the latter is still in its infancy. I therefore use the literature on organizational culture to highlight how organization scholars might contribute to the body of established party research. To illustrate the value of each of the four perspectives, I apply them to the case of the Danish green party Alternativet, which rose to prominence in late 2013 and later experienced serious setbacks. This case allows me to provide organizational answers to issues and problems that are often framed as strictly political and therefore excluded from consideration by many organization scholars.
Exiting the Factory (Volume 1)
Authors: Gallas Alexander
Published: January 2025

Karl Marx famously argued that the historical emergence of the working class as a collective actor resulted from acts of resistance against the continuous extension of the working day, which occurred in the context of the Industrial Revolution and was driven by capitalist competition. In an age where parts of the world experience sustained processes of deindustrialization, this raises the question of what happens to working classes when the factory gates are shut for good. It is possible to address this issue by resorting to strike research and focusing on the service and public sectors. Accordingly, the research question addressed in this book is this: What are the class effects of non-industrial strikes – or how far do they contribute to working-class formation? The author addresses it by taking three steps. First, he shows that the existing global labour studies literature insufficiently engages with class theory; second, he addresses this shortcoming by conceptualizing class and class formation from a critical-realist and materialist angle; and third, he conducts an incorporated comparison of non-industrial strike action around the globe in the age of the Great Crisis by (a) mapping 387 strikes in the service and public sectors from 56 countries and autonomous territories and (b) by zooming in on the railway strikes in Germany, the junior doctors’ strikes in Britain and the general strikes against austerity and the feminist general strikes in Spain.
From Organic Intellectuals to Academic Workers: How Knowledge Handlers Connect with Organized Labour
Authors: Gallas Alexander
Published: January 2025

In the preceding chapter, I argued that there is a normative foundation of global labour studies, which remains implicit in recent contributions to the field. I explained why there are sound reasons for global labour scholars to take a pro-worker stance, and that this means being in favour of workers exercising their collective power to undermine class domination. What I have not discussed so far, however, is what taking this stance means in practice. In other words, I have not examined how global labour scholars should operate if they take the normative foundation of their field seriously. This is what I will do in this and the next chapter. There is an obvious starting point for the how-question. If ‘being on the side of workers’ means supporting them in their efforts to contest capitalist class domination, this means supporting organized labour broadly understood, that is, any attempts of workers to organize and mobilize. In a nutshell, siding with workers means supporting workers’ struggles. If one considers that scholars are professional handlers of knowledge, this suggests that scholars with a pro-worker stance should make available knowledge to workers that is useful for their struggles – and that helps them make good strategic decisions. The theoretical critique of social domination needs to be articulated with forms of practical critique – collective practices that contest social domination. In the bellicose language of the young Marx, ‘[t]he weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon’ (2009a). These observations raise two questions: How can global labour scholars make useful strategic knowledge available for workers? And what kind of research designs do they need for this purpose?
The Challenge of Strategic Research: A Critical Engagement with the Power Resources Approach
Authors: Gallas Alexander
Published: January 2025

If we take the normative foundation of global labour studies seriously, the aim is to produce knowledge that is strategically relevant for workers. Consequently, it makes sense to focus on their collective agency, that is, on their capacity to actively shape the social world through joint action. The strike weapon is risky to use but forceful. Workers across the entire globe are resorting to it time and again – and have done so since labour movements emerged in the context of early industrialization. As such, it is of high strategic relevance – and ideally suited as a research object for global labour scholars. But the question remains what kind of categories are needed to analyse it systematically. An obvious choice for this endeavour is the PRA. It represents the most elaborate attempt to date in the field to develop a research framework that can be used to produce strategically relevant knowledge. Furthermore, it is a low-threshold approach. It works with clearly defined, parsimonious categories and thus is easy to use. The use value of the PRA is reflected in a plethora of studies based on it, which are usually aimed at identifying strategies for labour revitalization. A significant number of students in German GLU programme, most of whom are union officials or labour practitioners, employ it in their coursework and dissertations.
The Constitution of Class in Capitalism: From the Relations of Production to Collective Agency
Authors: Gallas Alexander
Published: January 2025

From what I discussed in the last chapter, it follows that the overall aim of Marxist class theory is to identify features of the capitalist mode of production with class effects. Any conceptualization of class in capitalism based on a critical-realist, materialist ontology needs to have a specific entry point – a vantage point from which it is possible to discern how class relations are produced and reproduced. If we follow Marx’s line of argument in the first volume of Capital (1976: 90), there are, at the heart of each mode of production, distinct relations of production, which concern how ownership of ‘the object and the means of labour’ also conditions people’s relations with each other (Poulantzas, 1974: 18). Accordingly, it makes sense to start one’s theorization of class from here. The capitalist relations of production entail a specific division of labour that is the foundation of class relations in any capitalist social formation (Poulantzas, 1974: 18; Marx, 1976: 415; Carchedi, 1977: 1). In a nutshell, the capitalist organization of work determines, in the first instance, how class is lived and experienced. It creates a force field that conditions people’s lives. We can call this the class structure – a term that points to pre-existing social conditions under which people encounter each other, and under which they act, which is located in the ontological domain of the ‘deep’. Starting from the relations of production, I explain, in what follows, how class in capitalism can be conceptualized, that is, what the capitalist class structure looks like, and why the state plays an important role in its constitution.
Inequality, Insecurity and Minding the Gap
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

This chapter addresses the fact that the current era has been one marred by ever-widening inequality, where increasing poverty and destitution have surged amid burgeoning opulence and wealth. The latter has been marked by the revival of an ultraprivileged economic elite inhabiting an exclusive social sphere beyond the reach of an increasingly insecure and moribund mainstream society. Thomas Piketty’s thesis is referred to here in relation to the fact that the yawning gap between rich and poor now threatens to become unbridgeable as inherited wealth accumulates across generations further stifling social mobility, a scenario highly evident in the US, the UK and other nations that have embraced neoliberalism. The manner in which this scenario has been sustained ideologically and politically is addressed in relation to a discussion of historical attitudes towards economic injustice and treatment of the poor. However, while briefly flagging up these well-documented trends, this chapter also presents an argument, referring to the key theoretical themes, as to why high levels of inequality as well as insecurity appear to have such corrosive individual and collective effects, with specific reference to the emotions that arise where people’s internalized notions of how the world should work conflict significantly with their experience.
Introduction
Authors: Kuhn Timothy
Published: January 2025

This chapter begins the book’s challenge to conventional theories of the firm by arguing that the central problem of the firm lies in purpose, which is more complex and provocative than typically assumed. The chapter examines the battle over corporate purpose between advocates of shareholder value maximization and stakeholder obligation, highlighting the clash of ideologies and the significance of purpose in shaping the identity and trajectory of a firm. It then delves into firms’ ontological multiplicity, emphasizing that purpose is not singular but rather takes different forms, manifests differently in various practices, and is influenced by a range of forces beyond human actors. It argues for the importance of developing a new theory of the firm that aligns with critical projects and offers alternative perspectives on corporate purpose. This introductory chapter advocates for a new framework that ties together the core questions of why firms exist, how they operate internally, where their boundaries lie, and how they secure profitability. It establishes the need to develop a Communicative Theory of the Firm (CTF) that responds to the shifts in capitalism's communicative foundation.
New Generation Struggles
Authors: Mills Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

Chapter 4 traces a set of ‘new generation struggles’ that have emerged following the large-scale provision of HIV medicines through South Africa’s public health system. Just as HIV precipitated forms of embodied vulnerability when medicines were not readily available, so too have HIV medicines generated new forms of embodied vulnerability, including side effects, treatment fatigue and viral resistance. These struggles are less frequently discussed or considered when looking at the history of the struggle for HIV medicines, but they are increasingly important as they often lead to poor treatment adherence and sometimes death. The economic context in which people navigate their treatment regimens has also been shown to affect whether or not people are able to adhere to their medicines: some medicines need to be kept refrigerated, and without money for electricity or access to electricity, this renders medicines ineffective. These linked struggles, around the embodiment of HIV medicines and the socio-economic context in which these medicines are taken, are foregrounded through ethnographic accounts drawn from my own research in South Africa and also from current research elsewhere in Africa, Latin America and South East Asia.
The Quiet Diplomacy of the Chibok Abductions
Authors: Botha Sven
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the concept and character of quiet diplomacy. Attention is given to the characterization of quiet diplomacy when non-state actors are involved in the process. A brief literature review pertaining to quiet diplomacy is provided; emphasis is placed on the scarcity of quiet diplomacy within the African context, particularly outside of the South Africa–Zimbabwe paradigm. The chapter discusses Boko Haram as a case study, focusing on its track record with negotiation as well as the occurrences surrounding the Chibok abductions. Following discussion of the case study, the characteristics of quiet diplomacy are applied to the Chibok abductions. The final section of the chapter reflects on the lessons that can be learnt from the negotiation process with Boko Haram and summarizes the main arguments.
African Agency: The Case of Russian Nuclear Programmes in Egypt, Ghana, South Africa and Zambia
Authors: Kachur Dzvinka , Foley Robyn
Published: January 2025

Access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy is one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Currently, almost 94 per cent of energy in Africa is generated from fossil fuels, perpetuating climate change risks. Africa has the fastest growing population and economy and thus requires just energy transitions that would tackle poverty, industrialization and decarbonization simultaneously. Nuclear energy is one of the decarbonized options that the African Union is actively working on with the International Atomic Energy Agency for sustainable development in Africa. But to what extent do geopolitical influences shape different African countries’ energy choices? China, France, Russia, South Korea and the US are offering their nuclear technologies to African countries. However, the Russian state-owned enterprise Rosatom has the largest number of contracts signed and is seen as a leader in promoting nuclear energy on the continent. This chapter investigates the geopolitical influences that shape the development of nuclear aspirations on the continent from the other end, focusing on the agency of South Africa, Egypt, Ghana and Zambia in their bilateral relations with Russia.
Everyday Eating
Authors: Warde Alan
Published: January 2025

Everyday Eating examines how UK eating habits have developed since the 1950s. It describes continuity and discontinuity in ways of going about organising meals, shopping, cooking, and experiencing and expressing taste. Some major changes are observed in how and what people in Britain have eaten since the middle of the 20th century, but the book argues that the key trends developed over decades and that change was slow and uneven. Trends originating in the 1970s continued to hold sway and determine the direction of travel well into the 21st century. Greater informality of manners and social arrangements has affected almost all aspects of food consumption. Unresolved controversy about the mass production and consumption of heavily manufactured and globally transported foodstuffs has continuously shaped dominant understandings of what it means to eat well. Eating out has underpinned transformations of taste since the 1960s, not least through the normalisation of foreign cuisines. Changes in household composition and organisation have slowly modified the routines of food preparation and the domestic division of labour. Both pleasures and anxieties have intensified. These developments have all been subject to variation by class, gender and ethnicity, the intersections of which have structured emergent patterns. The book paints a picture of diversification of eating patterns, emphasising neglected social and cultural forces and processes behind emergent trends. It concludes with a summary audit of change and continuity since the 1950s.
Acquisition and Diversity
Authors: Warde Alan
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines what people buy and eat, and how that is governed by the availability, affordability and acceptability of foodstuffs. It describes how tastes cluster, and how clustering varies with income, education, age and gender. Thus different sections of the population have greater or lesser access to diverse and nutritious foods. Attention is paid to food poverty and the spread of food banks. It charts the availability of different foodstuffs arising from global trade which has introduced new ingredients to fuel greater diversity. The range of products in circulation came to be determined primarily by a small number of supermarket chains in the later 20th century, at the expense of specialist outlets. The chapter ends with an extended critical appraisal (practical and theoretical) of the effects of the commodification of food supply. It discusses alternative modes of supply beyond retail markets, including institutional catering, domestic hospitality and freeganism.
Anxious Pleasures: Eating and Happiness
Authors: Warde Alan
Published: January 2025

This chapter assesses the contribution of eating to the delivery of pleasure and the arousal of anxiety. It is argued that on aggregate the British population experiences both greater pleasure and greater anxiety than before. Evidence shows that dining out, especially at the homes of other people, is reliably very enjoyable. Eating at home is also for the most part both pleasurable and satisfying. More popular and scientific attention is devoted to anxiety and its causes, the forms of which have evolved from absolute and relative shortages of food, through nutritional quality and the prevention of illness, to ethical concern about production and consumption. Typical ways of dealing with anxiety are discussed, including recourse to habit and the adoption of formal dietary regimes. Other contemporary concerns about obesity, meat eating and environmental sustainability are addressed.
Brexit, Tweeted
Authors: Bastos Marco
Published: January 2025

The book explores a data set of 45 million tweets about Brexit posted by a quarter of a million British users. This database was collected in real time and on a rolling basis to monitor the activity ofsts a cohort of users we identified as the British Twitter Monthly Active Userbase. The data include posts from April 2016, the official start of the campaign period, until the end of January 2021, when the United Kingdom left the European Union. We take stock of emerging trends in the data pointing towards epochal changes in partisan politics, including the political realignment towards nationalist and populist values, but also broader societal changes feeding into polarization and echo-chamber communication. The book also provides an account of how social media manipulation emerged to national and then international attention in the run up to the referendum campaign and in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, including a detailed account of techniques employed to interfere and potentially distort the public discussion. The book closes with an analysis of the precarity and ephemerality of social media register, as nearly one-third of messages tweeted about Brexit disappeared from the public domain in the following years.
Political Realignment
Authors: Bastos Marco
Published: January 2025

This chapter takes stock of the socioeconomic and cultural realignment in British politics underpinning the 2016 UK EU membership referendum, including economic inequality and a cultural backlash by older, traditional, and less educated voters. This cultural tension maximized political cleavages and deepened the wedge separating culturally divisive issues that would drive a realignment in the British political value space where the Conservative Party embraced nationalist rhetoric in response to European integration and immigration, whereas the Labour Party consolidated its grip on the liberal, educated, and affluent metropolitan elite clustered in and around London. We take stock of these two hypotheses and discuss the extent to which this political backdrop is reflected on our large database of Brexit tweets.
Nationalism and Populism
Authors: Bastos Marco
Published: January 2025

In this chapter we discuss nationalism and populism in British politics and review the literature on the cultural cleavage that incorporated nationalist rhetoric in response to European integration and immigration. We test Inglehart and Norris’s dual hypotheses of economic insecurity versus cultural backlash as key developments underpinning the upsurge in nationalistic and populist sentiments, the former foregrounding the economic decline of the blue-collar working class, and the latter arguing that sectors of the population have become increasingly inward-looking and averse to progressive value change. This chapter also unpacks the political value space used to train a machine learning algorithm and the resulting analysis of the Brexit tweets.
The Politics of Deletion
Authors: Bastos Marco
Published: January 2025

Chapter Nine takes stock of the remarkable and disturbing rate of deletion of social media content by considering Brexit data that are now unavailable. We unpack the politics of deletion by inspecting the ratio of deleted tweets and accounts that participated in the Brexit debate. We show that 33 per cent of the tweets leading up to the referendum vote have been removed, that only about half of the most active users who tweeted the referendum continue to operate publicly, that 20 per cent of the accounts that tweeted the referendum are no longer active, and that more messages from the Leave campaign disappeared than made up the entire universe of tweets affiliated with the Remain campaign. We argue that while the ephemerality of social media posts may be a reasonable expectation, the magnitude of content deletion poses considerable challenges for informed public deliberation around matters where the issue being deliberated on is constantly disappearing from public scrutiny.
Conclusion
Authors: Bastos Marco
Published: January 2025

This concluding chapter takes stock of the Brexit referendum as a milestone in the political realignment that moved Western democracies towards nationalistic and populist sentiments, a development accompanied by the upsurge in affective polarization, proattitudinal partisan news consumption, echo-chamber communication, and coordinated and inauthentic social media activity. We argue that the Brexit debate on social media provides a bird’s-eye view to political developments that would define much of the political landscape in the early 21st century and that are likely to continue defining much of the contentious politics in the first decades of this century, as technological change continues to trigger cultural, economic, and legal disruption.
The Coloniality of Modern Slavery in Latin America
Authors: O’Connell Chris
Published: January 2025

Modern slavery is a contested and confusing issue. In recent years significant critiques have emerged of the mainstream approach that frames modern slavery as an individualized relationship linked to economic underdevelopment. This chapter addresses two such critiques: weak historicity and the lack of analysis of power relations, particularly the role of the state. This chapter applies the concept of ‘coloniality of power’ – which involves two interrelated processes of racialized categorization and the articulation of forms of labour control to produce commodities for the world market – to cases of exploitation in post-independence Latin America. The chapter draws on documentary and field research to analyse state responses to modern slavery in the guano and rubber sectors in Peru’s neocolonial state; and to the exploitation and abuse of Indigenous Guaraní in Bolivia’s ‘decolonizing’ state under the government of Evo Morales. The chapter finds a coloniality approach to have strong utility, focusing attention on overlooked interconnections between racialization, labour control, and global capitalism. It also reveals that, far from a simple enforcer of laws, the state’s role is ambiguous. While the Bolivian case provides some evidence that states can act to reduce vulnerability, more often they help to create the conditions for exploitation under the pretext of ‘development’. In both cases the state’s prioritization of capitalism saw it reproduce racialized divisions and deepen vulnerability. These findings call for a reorientation of modern slavery scholarship and practice towards critical engagement with colonial legacies, global capitalism, and the state.
Beyond Victim-Centric Research: Participatory Action Research in a Trafficking ‘Hotspot’ of Nepal
Authors: Bhagat Ayushman
Published: January 2025

‘Human trafficking’ represents a complex global concern plagued by definitional ambiguities, ideological disagreements, and the (un)intended harmful consequences of anti-trafficking measures. Despite well-established critical scholarship that exposes the ‘collateral damage’ caused by these measures, research funding continues to support top down research endeavours aimed at identifying, rescuing, sorting, labelling, classifying, and rehabilitating vulnerable people on the move. These colonial forms of research often justify harmful anti-trafficking measures; producing new measures that often neglect the experiences and perceptions of the targets of such interventions. Whilst it is recognised that anti-trafficking research carries a problematic political epistemology, researchers often argue that there is a need for more research on ‘trafficking victims’ or ‘survivors’. In this chapter, I caution against exclusive victim-centred research, which may deepen boundaries between deserving and undeserving subjects of knowledge and protection. To address this concern, I provide a detailed account in this chapter of an academic Participatory Action Research (PAR) conducted in a post-disaster Himalayan location in Nepal, often stigmatized as a ‘hotspot’ of human trafficking. This PAR engages with people considered as targets of anti-trafficking who are attempting to undo the stigma of trafficking attached to their place. In this chapter, I illustrate the messy sites, capturing tensions, failures, and emotionally charged moments that lead to disruptions during the research process. These disruptions raise questions about both the perception and translation of dense power relations and the significance of the knowledge produced amid multiplicity for everyone involved in the research process. Through this chapter, I advocate for an inclusive and situated approach to trafficking research that acknowledges the full spectrum of mobility and labour experiences, challenging dominant trafficking research that deepen boundaries between victims and non-victims.
Introduction
Authors: Henderson Holly , Alexander Rosie , Baldacchino Godfrey
Published: January 2025

The introduction sets out the key rationale behind a book focusing on higher education in small island contexts and introduces the key themes for the book. The chapter starts by focusing on the value of a small island lens for surfacing and exploring issues of place and mobility, which are significant concerns in higher education provision more generally. The chapter then moves to providing an overview of existing literature relating to island higher education, drawing particularly on a body of work developed in the 1980s and 1990s on higher education in small states, which includes island states. Key themes from this literature are explored and contextualized in relation to current themes in higher education scholarship and the context of the small island (rather than the small state). The chapter concludes by introducing the structure of the book and providing an introduction to each of the chapters.
Reimagining Parliamentary Governance
Authors: Yong Ben
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines the important, but often overlooked, issue of parliamentary governance. How parliament organises and maintains itself is a fundamental question of the UK’s constitution: it goes to legitimacy and effectiveness of the legislature in carrying out its core constitutional functions. Parliamentary governance is the set of arrangements which determine the administration of parliament as an organisation and its resources; of how objectives in parliament are set; the means of attaining those objectives; and how accountability for those arrangements is effected. The chapter critiques present governance arrangements: in short, they are weak, ineffective and non-transparent. From this critical base, four principles are identified – prioritising the institution; effective governance mechanisms; clear lines of accountability; and representation – to guide reimagining; and seven practical proposals are identified as key steps towards attaining this reimagined future.
Reimagining Scrutiny
Authors: Maer Lucinda
Published: January 2025

This chapter seeks to reimagine scrutiny by considering what effective scrutiny would look like, and what would need to change in parliament to move further towards it. It starts by noting that what is unique about parliamentary scrutiny is the notion of democratic accountability. It then sets out the principles of what makes scrutiny effective – including the gathering and interrogating of information, connecting parliament to the public and other relevant activity inside and outside Westminster. Further, it has to be engaging for Members, and have an impact on the Government. Much of what can be reimagined can be done without large scale structural or procedural change, as shown by the ongoing development of the House of Commons’ select committee system which has captured the imagination of Members and those who engage with it. The chapter concludes that reimagined parliamentary scrutiny needs to impact the government. In essence this means that scrutiny has to be ‘good’ for government to welcome it, and government must be open to scrutiny in order for it to be good.
Conclusion: Thinking Seriously about Starting Over
Authors: Judge David , Leston-Bandeira Cristina
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines how the foundational principles identified in preceding chapters – primarily engagement, connectedness, accessibility, inclusion, equality, fairness, responsiveness, accountability, wellness, ethical propriety, sustainability and flexibility – guide the rethinking of parliamentary space, connectivity and interaction in Westminster. The breadth of reimagining is mapped in an indicative listing of practical proposals which can be derived from the deployment of these principles in each chapter. Yet, in different ways, each chapter also reveals how the boundaries of institutional reimagining illuminate the systemic constraints of the UK’s polity and society. In turn this prompts questions about the necessity of further serious thinking about reimagining the broader institutions and processes of parliamentary democracy and parliamentary government in the UK. The chapter concludes, therefore, with a call for cascaded reimagining of these systemic features by others.
Developing a Critical Pedagogy of Migration Studies
Authors: Piacentini Teresa
Published: January 2025

We are living in challenging times, with migration at the centre of intense political debates, border violence and divisive rhetoric. These issues are not entirely new; they have deep roots in colonial histories, and understanding how the past connects to the political now and influences the classroom is vital for disrupting dominant paradigms of knowing and fostering transformative change. Moreover, the ethical and emotional aspects of teaching and learning about migration across disciplines are also urgent and pressing, and this too is hard intellectual work demanding criticality and reflection. This book addresses these questions and challenges. It offers theoretically informed pedagogical approaches for teaching and learning about migration, emphasizing the interconnectedness of ethics, politics and practice, and urges teachers and students to take these connections seriously. The book has two main objectives. First, it delves into critical pedagogy and its connection to various fields and disciplines where migration is a topic of intellectual focus, exploring the ethical and political dimensions of teaching practice and the discomforting aspects of this work. It emphasizes the complexities of interrupting and disrupting existing paradigms of how knowledge is produced and reproduced, experienced, and refused. Second, the book takes an action-oriented approach, offering practical guidance through a wide range of pedagogical features and tools like talking points, case studies, problem posing and reflective tasks to foster disruption and transformation in teaching practices. By incorporating ethics, politics and a broader practice perspective, this book aims to transform cross-disciplinary teaching practices in the context of learning about migration
Readers Have History: Towards a Transactional Theory of New Literacies
Authors: Sipley Gina
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the relevance of transactional and sociocultural print-based literacy theories to the digital reading experience. At the centre of this discussion is an illustration of the shifting notions of author and reader on social media and how theories of print-based literacy are necessary for understanding the efferent and aesthetic motives of readers, which includes the decision of when to engage in specific lurker literacies.
A New Cold War
Authors: Leoni Zeno
Published: January 2025

The last decade has seen US–China relations enter a negative spiral. The evolution of this complex relationship has triggered a fast-growing debate on whether this is a New Cold War. Building on a deconstruction of concepts such as cold wars and the Cold War, this book illustrates how the relationship between the US and China has been a ‘marriage of convenience’ – with both cooperation and competition – for years, but also that we might be close to the end of it. The US and China, it is argued, are locked in a ‘new type of cold war’ where mechanisms of deterrence and competition differ compared to those of the Cold War, and which makes the return of bloc politics possible.
Turning Global Rights into Local Realities
Authors: Twum-Danso Imoh Afua
Published: January 2025

Dominant children’s rights discourses have long been critiqued as Western-biased due to their origins in 18th-century Western Europe. This historical context has been foregrounded in much of the literature on children’s rights, especially with the intention of illuminating the extent to which such discourses, based on their origins, are in sharp contrast to understandings of childhood and child development in societies in the South. While these critiques are valid, questions have emerged about the extent to which such arguments overlook the transformations that started to occur in so-called non-Western societies from the same period. Such transformations problematize arguments that foreground the inapplicability of children’s rights for contexts in the Global South due to the plurality that exists in children’s lived experiences. Therefore, instead of presenting children’s lived experiences in the South as being in sharp contrast to dominant rights discourses, the concept of a continuum, which highlights the varying intensity in the interactions between dominant children’s rights discourses and the realities of the lives of diverse groups of children, may better reflect a holistic picture of children’s lives. It is this continuum that this volume seeks to explore with a focus on Ghana, the first country to ratify the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. In particular this book will examine the various ways dominant children’s principles intersect with the lived realities of a range of children’s lives, with the view to not only highlighting the dissonance that exists, but also the synergies that can be identified.
Crimes of the Powerful and the Contemporary Condition
Authors: Lynes Adam , Treadwell James , Bavin Kyla
Published: January 2025

The ultimate expression of power is the ability to act beyond the confines of the law, with contemporary society enabling elite groups to wield ‘panoramic power’. This book charts how a select few have captured such power and how, along the way, they have eroded the very principles and processes of democracy. Within this democratic republic of capitalism, crimes, including the murderous actions of the corporate giants that provide us with life’s luxuries and necessities, financial crimes that span the globe, the harmful practices of weapon manufacturing, and the data-gathering activities of both media and educational institutions, will each be brought to attention. In doing so, the authors offer new thinking on damaging structures of power and privilege.This text proposes a thought-provoking and demanding exploration. It contends that for critical criminology to effectively illuminate the pressing issues we confront, there needs to be a comprehensive examination of the lives of our most vulnerable and marginalised citizens in contrast to the most influential. To achieve this objective, the text will leverage a diverse range of examples, cases and controversies pertinent to scholars in criminal and social justice. It argues that a genuinely enlightened comprehension of powerful crimes requires an examination at the meso, micro and macro levels, encompassing a thorough understanding of the socio-economic, political and cultural contexts in which crimes unfold.
Epilogue
Authors: Lynes Adam , Treadwell James , Bavin Kyla
Published: January 2025

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Inclusion in Post-Carbon Urban Experiments
Authors: Horne Ralph , Dorignon Louise
Published: January 2025

Urban sustainability experiments have drawn wide interest among scholars and practitioners of decarbonization. They often envisage agile local governments working with community initiatives, such as direct forms of exchange that shorten production-consumption chains and provide for human scale decarbonization practice. However, in reality, cities are entangled in globalized systems, whether they be ubiquitous digital technologies or data systems, or cultures and social rules associated with them. Moreover, national governments retain significant jurisdictional and financial power over city governments, and multi-level governance of post-carbon cities remains fraught and complex. This provides an overview of the diversity of urban experiments and networks that aim at enhancing urban sustainability. Drawing on a database of 80 projects in Australia and internationally, an empirical framework is proposed for situating post-carbon urban experiments within the broader field of urban experiments. So defined, post-carbon urban experiments focus on actions that deliberately aim to achieve inclusion and environmental sustainability, while practising for a post-carbon world. The considerable work done to date on ideas of socio-technical transitions and urban living labs is recognized. The conclusion reflects on prospects for urban post-carbon inclusion in practice.
Uneven Consumption and the Work of Being a High Consumer
Authors: Ambrose Aimee , Castano-Garcia Alvaro , Hawkins Anna , Parkes Stephen , Speake Beth , Arbell Yael
Published: January 2025

This chapter recognizes that debates around how to secure an inclusive post-carbon society must pay close attention to those who excessively consume. Our work here is premised on the notion that more equitable resource distribution relies on some groups consuming less to enable others to increase their consumption to safe and healthy levels. It explores why high and escalating consumption is problematic in the context of the climate crisis and discusses how high consumers might be most usefully conceptualized and defined. Furthermore, in attempting to advance a research agenda focused on high consumers, we reflect on the challenges of conducting research which runs contra to dominant economic paradigms (such as perpetual economic growth) and social conventions. We draw on a literature review and insights from stakeholder interviews with academics and practitioners which highlight the need for a greater focus on high consuming households and reveal the conceptual and ethical dilemmas this presents. We go on to discuss how research with this elusive group (high consumers) might best be approached and explore the potential of a novel application of institutional ethnography to explicate the ‘work’ of being wealthy.