bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Separated, Isolated and Unconnected
Authors: Alexander James
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the response from the local authority and the residents to the increased criminal and violent behaviour of the young people and shows how there was an increasing enforcement-led approach to addressing youth violence, which locally was seen through a US-inspired joint police and local authority initiative called Operation Shield. Observational and interview data is used to describe the gang call-in process and assess the young people’s and wider neighbourhood’s view of its effectiveness. This supported by a discussion of the applicability of US-initiated interventions within the UK context. This approach will be contrasted with the influence that the few individuals who still tried to support the young people had when interacting directly with the young people without being part of any wider informal network. In so doing, the chapter will show how individual acts of support have limited effectiveness in shaping the actions of young people. The chapter shows how the drive to provide more effective support through professional interventions increased the social space conducive for a youth street culture to develop. As such, the chapter will explore the effectiveness of relational and transactional support in providing localized social control and seeks to explore the potential role of more informal community guardianship approaches given the heightened concerns around contextual safeguarding, as well as wider neighbourhood risks levels.
Learning from the Past or More of the Same
Authors: Alexander James
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the recent developments in how young people at risk of exposure to serious youth violence are supported. Initially, the chapter takes a broad view, exploring how a public health approach has increased local and regional governments’ focus on some of the underlying causes of youth violence, such as ACEs, school exclusions and unemployment. Next, this discussion will consider how, after the Taylor Review (2016), the youth justice sector has moved to a child first approach, focusing on the young person’s welfare and developmental needs as a way to prevent offending, rather than the offence committed. From here, the chapter outlines how an awareness of contextual safeguarding has shifted the conversation about professionals’ statutory safeguarding duties from the home to extra familial harm such as serious youth violence and county lines. The chapter will then consider whether any of these developments have made a difference on the estate, with an appraisal of the limitations that contextual safeguarding responses such as relocating young people to safer areas and the focus on a case management approach of supporting individual young people, rather than addressing the underlying issues that persist in neighbourhoods themselves. Finally, it will explore how activities run by local people have adapted to address the needs of young people, including an increased appetite to embed trauma support within general youth activities.
Researching Children’s Experiences in a Conflict Zone and a Red-light Area: Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork in India and Kashmir 1
Authors: Rawat Ayushi
Published: September 2023

This chapter presents personal reflections and insights from my own fieldwork experiences. These ethnographic studies involved the children of sex workers in a red -light area in Pune, India, and children living in the conflict zone of Indian-administered Kashmir. The chapter addresses questions of reflexivity as an ethical stance, and the integral and dynamic role of researcher identity, which highlights the emotional labour of doing research on such sensitive research themes. This chapter also evaluates methods, tools, and fieldwork practices used to elicit the views of vulnerable children often neglected in such controversial and contested topics.
Jacinda Ardern and the Politics of Leadership Empathy: Towards Emotional Communities of Transformation
Authors: Khorana Sukhmani
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the case study of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, in particular her performance of empathy in the aftermath of a white supremacist attack on mosques in Christchurch. The purpose of this detailed discursive study of relevant news coverage and photographs is to illustrate: (1) a shift in the Western mediascape whereby political leaders, among others, are scrutinised not just for their private feelings in a public disaster but are also required to perform empathy alongside those most affected; (2) the emotional communities this leads to, which could be a building ground for solidarities with migrant communities in the future. While what is presented here is certainly not a perfect example of a leader as the Ardern government has been criticised for its record on slashing immigration, it is a useful one to understand contemporary public manifestations of empathy.
Asian Americans and Asian Australians on Screen: Aspiring to Centre the Community Through Comedy
Authors: Khorana Sukhmani
Published: September 2023

This chapter undertakes the work of examining a new kind of aspiration that has collective transformative potential through a close reading of two key Asian American and Asian Australian media texts, and how they have been received by their respective audiences. The texts are Indian American comedian Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act series, which aired on Netflix from 2018 to 2020, and Sri Lankan Australian stand-up comic Nazeem Hussain’s Legally Brown series, which appeared on Australia’s ‘multicultural broadcaster’, SBS, in 2013–14. The case study approach employed here pays particular attention to episodes about the status and future of one’s own migrant community, such as Minhaj’s on the importance of the Asian American vote in the 2020 Presidential election and Hussain’s skits on ‘Uncle Sam’ and ‘Muslim Shore’.
Refugee Storytellers Claim Belonging: Agency, Community and Change Through the Arts
Authors: Khorana Sukhmani
Published: September 2023

This chapter shifts the focus in the instance of refugee storytelling from the intentions of the non-refugee interlocutors and the feelings of the audience members to the affective, rational and relational agency of the refugees themselves. Using refugee and ex-refugee storytellers across a range of mediums as case studies, it asks the question – with refugee agency front and centre, what would their stories look like, and how would they help create feelings and communities of belonging? Educating non-refugee audiences is not the primary goal of these stories. Rather, they are more vested in the process of recovering and re-telling traumatic histories in a way that is beneficial for refugees or ex-refugees themselves. In addition, it creates platforms of inter-generational dialogue in refugee families and helps them connect with other disadvantaged communities in their new homes.
‘I Wouldn’t Call it Torture’: Conceptualizing Torturous Violence
Authors: Canning Victoria
Published: September 2023

In the month prior to submitting this book for publication I garnered opinions of approximately 100 practitioners working on trauma, torture, violence and rehabilitation, discussing if or how much the concept of torture is of central relevance to their work. For some, particularly lawyers and legal advisors working on international committees and advising governments accused of torture, it was paramount: without the concept of torture, all aspects of international or criminal justice, accountability or torture rehabilitation would be defunct. Others alluded to the possibility of ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’, only themselves to agree that the concept of and terminology around ‘torturous’ holds a linguistic and discourse advantage in its derivation of ‘torture’, given torture’s common understanding as the most heinous of all violence. For others, my continued inclusion of legal definitions of torture undoes the objective of transcending definitional boundaries of torture, since some aspects of the book continue to build around it. For some psychologists and psychotraumatologists in particular, the term can be relevant for survivors of torture, but far from relevant to treatment or rehabilitation since extreme violence may have been part of a longer-term trajectory, even from childhood. As a number of people argued, even assessing for ‘torture’ can be highly problematic: people receiving support can relay torture as one of many traumatic events or forms of serious physical or psychological violence. Without a torture assessment, they might see many more self-elected survivors of extreme violence who experience the same impacts of trauma. In short, torture assessments may be useful to an extent for responding to state inflicted or sanctioned torture, but they also act as a metaphorical sieve for responding to other forms of extreme violence, even those which may mirror torture in their sustained and impactful nature.
Sexualized Torture and Sexually Torturous Violence
Authors: Canning Victoria
Published: September 2023

Whether rape and sexualized violence is inherently perceived as torture is the subject of debate. For feminists such as Copelon (2004) and MacKinnon (2006), rape is in and of itself torture, while for others, such as Green and Ward (2004) and Rodley (2015, cited in Davis, 2017; see also Rodley, 2002), defining rape as torture lies in state participation or culpability. For some of the practitioners interviewed across my research projects who counselled survivors of rape in any capacity, sexualized violence has been variously defined: some as torture because of the levels of pain and humiliation inflicted on survivors, as well as any resultant traumata; some adamant that state involvement is a crucial aspect. This is the case in relation to publicly political realms, such as prisons, but also domestic and interpersonal spheres, and outside of typical conflict or persecutory violence, especially violence by partners or other family members and traffickers (see also Herman, 1992; Peel, 2004; McGregor, 2014). To some degree, this chapter addresses the implications of endemic levels of sexualized violence in conflict which is seldom discussed as ‘torture’ but as tactical rape (Peel, 2004; Fitzpatrick, 2016). Relevant UN Security Council Resolutions are critically explored, and more recent steps taken to define and understand such violence as torture is evaluated (for example, the recent special editions of the Torture journal which focus on sexualized, gender-based and gendered torture [2018]). However, the primary objective of this chapter is to determine what separates these categories of violence, and if or how these are contingent with case study examples of violence when we focus on forms and impacts, rather than motivations and context.
Hacking Mobility
Authors: Odendaal Nancy
Published: September 2023

One of the most challenging spatial issues in African cities is the lack of adequate and integrated mobility systems. African urban dwellers predominantly rely on paratransit to traverse the city. This chapter explores several locally developed ride-hail applications in Uganda and Kenya, and the implications for future mobility.
Digital Food Dialogues
Authors: Odendaal Nancy
Published: September 2023

Food insecurity is increasing in African cities and became particularly pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic. High food costs and the limited availability of core products are largely informed by inefficient supply chains and the lack of recognition of the informal economy and its role in the supply and distribution of food, as well as its role in enabling livelihoods. The applications discussed in this chapter focus on addressing such inefficiencies and incorporated street vendors and small farmers in the supply chain in Kenya. The chapter also considers community mobilization in relation to food exchange under COVID-19 lockdown measures in South Africa and the use of drones to monitor geophysical change related to crop management in Zanzibar.
Platform Practices and the Public Imagination
Authors: Odendaal Nancy
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the many imaginations of the digital city. It does this from three vantage points. The first explores intentional digital places that seek to use technology to define and articulate their textures and establish global connections in Kenya. The second focuses on cultural practices, also in Kenya, examining an arts hub as a physical and digital melting pot of cultural talents, intended to disrupt urban space through cultural networking. The third vantage point explores the cultural practices and representation of African urban futures through an examination of Afrofuturism as emblematic of the disrupted hybrid city. The aim here is to look towards the future of African urban spaces by examining the present and how it engages the past.
Introduction
Authors: Mukherjee Utsa
Published: September 2023

This chapter provides the context for this book – outlining its key conceptual issues and making a case for taking children’s leisure seriously. It shows how the study of leisure can offer a new point of entry into crucial sociological debates around identities, subjectivities and inequalities. The methodological approach underpinning the study is also discussed here alongside the ethical questions of researching the interior lives of racialised minority families.
Critical Sociology of Children’s Leisure: A Framework
Authors: Mukherjee Utsa
Published: September 2023

This chapter lays down the core theoretical premise of a ‘critical sociology of children’s leisure’ that draws on current debates within leisure studies as well as childhood studies and forges a conceptual ground for a critical analysis of middle-class British Indian children’s leisure geographies. It begins with a critique of the adult-centrism that lies at the heart of leisure theory, introducing key issues in childhood and leisure research, before moving on to the tripartite model for studying children’s leisure that forms the basis of the study with British Indian children. The arguments and conceptual schemes presented in this chapter have wider relevance for researchers working in this area especially in the global north.
Concerted Cultivation the Indian Way? Organised Leisure and Racial Parenting Strategy
Authors: Mukherjee Utsa
Published: September 2023

This chapter builds on Lareau’s (2000, 2011) notion of ‘concerted cultivation’ to illuminate the ways in which the parents in the study marshalled structured leisure activities as sites for the holistic development of their children and to equip them with prized skills, connections and dispositions that will put them in good stead in higher education and the professional job market. However, unlike Lareau, the findings here reveal that in racialised middle-class contexts concerted cultivated through leisure carries both classed and racial connotations. The parents interviewed saw these organised activities as opportunities for their children to amass coveted soft skills, behavioural competencies and dominant species of cultural capital that are valued in the white majority settings in which they live and work. At the same time, they invested significant portions of their money, time and energy in enrolling their children in leisure lessons that can transmit ‘ethnic cultural capital’ linked to their Indian heritage. This chapter, therefore, expands our understanding of concerted cultivation ideologies – which have received much scholarly attention in recent years – by revealing how it contributes to class reproduction as well as ethnic and racial socialisation in ethnic minority middle-class families.
The Fun, the Boring and the Racist Name Calling: How Children Make Sense of Their Leisure Geographies
Authors: Mukherjee Utsa
Published: September 2023

This chapter foreground children’s lived experiences and understandings of their own leisure schedules to unpack how leisure mediates their engagement with the world around them. Relying on children’s and parents’ accounts, it directs attention to the way children negotiate leisure choices with parents and the idioms they deploy in classifying and evaluating various activities. Ideas of ‘fun’ and ‘boring’ resonate across child participants’ narratives, where these notions perform a range of political work in terms of shaping leisure schedules and attitudes of children. Moreover, from the vantage point of children’s perspective, the chapter reflects on how children draw on their class resources to play the leisure market in concert with their parents and establish their own status as consumers in the neoliberal marketplace of leisure options. Notwithstanding the class privileges that enable these children’s leisure behaviour, especially in the context of organised activities, their location in the racial hierarchy as ethnic minority subjects fractures these leisure spaces as they often find themselves at the receiving end of racial stereotypes and aggression from white peers. The way children deal with these racist incidents offers a window into the relational nature of their agency.
Negotiated Temporalities: Leisure, Time-Use and Everyday Life
Authors: Mukherjee Utsa
Published: September 2023

This chapter adopts a temporal lens to explore time issues in participating families vis-à-vis leisure. Although time is widely invoked in definitions of leisure, our understanding of the way time is subjectively perceived and utilised in and for leisure in racialised middle-class settings is thin on the ground. This chapter addresses this gap by exploring key manifestations of time and leisure in participation families which pivot around notion of busyness and family time, navigation of ‘screen-time’ in relation to children’s digital leisure, and ‘alone time’ as an instantiation of solitary leisure. Each of these axes illuminate the way race and class inflect experiences of time within families, and how opportunities for various genres of leisure are carved out in relation to each other. By theorising leisure within families as ‘negotiated temporalities’, this chapter pushes current debates on time, family life and children’s everyday geographies into new directions
Relating, Place-Making and the Cultural Politics of Leisuring
Authors: Mukherjee Utsa
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on how leisure practices mediate children’s social relationships as well as the mechanisms through which community-based British Indian leisure arrangements direct place-making within the urban multiculture of Greater London and reinforce the role of diasporic groups as agents of city-making and transformation of urban socialities. Given London’s history as a preeminent migrant city, collective acts of leisuring mounted through the voluntary effort of middle-class British Indians reinscribe the social and cultural geographies of the city and help educate ethnic others and next generation of British Indians about their distinct cultural practices and intangible heritage. These insights further underscore the fact that leisure in the lives of middle-class Indian diasporic families cannot be reduced to individual psychological dimensions alone.
Multiple For(u)ms of Resistance: Humour, Agency and Power
Authors: Hammett Daniel , Martin Laura S. , Nwankwọ Izuu
Published: September 2023

This first part of this chapter reviews the literature exploring the relationship(s) between humour, power and resistance in Africa, and considers how humour circulates in everyday life. The chapter then analyses other roles humour plays in African societies, namely as a coping mechanism as well as social commentary. By exploring these different, often intersecting roles, we begin illustrating the multiple types of political work humour does.
The Last Laugh?
Authors: Hammett Daniel , Martin Laura S. , Nwankwọ Izuu
Published: September 2023

The final chapter concludes with reflective discussions around the relationship between resistance, power, humour and agency in Africa emphasizing that in order to understand the complexities involved in humour and political work, it is necessary to recognize how humour enacts a particular type of agency. Finally, we explore what the implications of our findings are for more contemporary issues, like COVID-19, as well as for understanding what these power relations mean for notions such as decolonizing knowledge.
Women Activists, Gendered Power and Postfeminism in Taiwan’s ‘Sunflower Movement’
Authors: Yang Chia-Ling
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines gendered power and women’s experiences in the ‘Sunflower Movement’ in Taiwan, also known as the 3/18 Parliament Occupation Movement. This large-scale, intensive, month-long protest against a trade pact with China in 2014, which centred on a protest camp within the parliament building, was marred by several gender imbalances. However, emerging research on the 3/18 Movement largely ignores gender and women’s experiences. In contrast, this chapter focuses on how individual women and women’s organisations responded to gendered representations and gender imbalances in the parliamentary occupation, as well as in the larger movement. I will argue that the young women activists employed feminist perspectives when analysing the inequalities they faced, but did not turn to feminist approaches or the women’s movement in their responses, instead employing a variety of individualised strategies. This is explained as a result of specific postfeminist contexts in Taiwan.
Protest Camps as ‘Homeplace’? Social Reproduction in and against Neoliberal Capitalism
Authors: Eschle Catherine
Published: September 2023

This chapter brings feminist literatures on domestic space and the gendered division of labour into dialogue with research into protest camps. It responds to a groundbreaking account of protest camps by Anna Feigenbaum and colleagues (2013), which argues that social reproduction is integral to the political effect of camps. Yet this point remains insufficiently interrogated in their framework; as a result, gendered and racialised inequalities and insecurities in protest camps are not fully explained, and continuities with the wider neoliberal capitalist context are downplayed. In this chapter, I draw on Marxist and Black/​anti-racist feminist research to examine the ways in and extent to which social reproduction was reconstructed in two protest camps in my locality, Occupy Glasgow and Faslane Peace Camp. This allows for some wider lessons to be drawn about the structural limitations of protest camps as sites of resistance to neoliberal capitalism and austerity politics.
Project Democracy in Protest Camps: Caring, the Commons and Feminist Democratic Theory
Authors: Kavada Anastasia
Published: September 2023

Drawing on empirical research on the movements of the squares, including Occupy and Nuit Debout, this chapter outlines the insights offered by feminist thought into the democratic practices of protest camps. The squares movements practised a kind of ‘project democracy’ by building an inclusive system of decision-making that facilitated the undertaking of projects. The chapter shows that, first, the squares movements operated with an expanded notion of civic duty that also included the reproduction of the civic body through activities of caring. Second, it demonstrates how care ethics, with their emphasis on dependence and vulnerability, informed the democratic practices of the movements of the squares. Third, it highlights how these movements challenged the connection between private property and democracy by operating with the logic of the commons, a framework of relationships based on the communal sharing of resources that places care and interdependence at the centre of democratic politics.
Feminised and Decolonising Reoccupations, Re-existencias and Escrevivências : Learning from Women’s Movement Collectives in Northeast Brazil
Authors: Motta Sara C. , de Carvalho Sandra Maria Gadelha , Alencar Claudiana Nogueira de , Silva Mila Nayane da
Published: September 2023

In this chapter we trace the feminised, decolonising and revolutionary nature of reoccupations, re-existencias and escrevivências occurring in movement collectives in Ceará, Northeast Brazil: Mãos que Criam, a women’s cooperative that forms part of the Zé Maria de Tomé Movimento Sem Terra Settlement, and three collectives of Afro-Brazilian women poets and artisans of the periphery of Fortaleza. We explore what the sharing of herstories of popular movements and collectives can illuminate regarding reoccupations and defence – not only of physical territories of the rural and urban landscapes but also of the political and of the emancipatory political subject herself. We consider the implications for the politics of knowledge of engaging with such praxis. We focus therefore on pluralising and provincialising conceptualisation, and foreground how this necessarily involves the decolonising of reason bound by modern/​​coloniality and the enfleshment of epistemology. In particular, we dwell and bring to thought in relation the concepts of the ‘feminisation of resistance’, escrevivência and the gramática da dor e alegria, and their interweaving with the concept and practice of reoccupation.
Feminism on Aboriginal Land: The 1983 Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp, Central Australia
Authors: Bartlett Alison
Published: September 2023

The 1983 Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp held in central Australia was inspired by Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK and conceived as one of its international support actions. In this chapter, however, I want to reorient this origin story to remember it as a protest site on Aboriginal land rather than one primarily derived from Greenham Common. Protest camps are capable of holding multiple meanings and reorienting the focus can produce new insights and engagements. This particular feature, of Australia’s relatively recent colonising history, differentiates the politics of Australian protest camps from other global protests. Taking three key ‘scenes’ from the archives of the Pine Gap protest camp around racism, men and policing, this chapter constructs key encounters between women protestors through their entanglements and engagements while doing feminism on Aboriginal land.
Conclusion
Authors: Scott John , Staines Zoe
Published: September 2023

This final chapter presents a more comprehensive vision for island criminologies, drawing together several theoretical and conceptual threads that are woven through preceding sections of the book. Much of what we build on here is an extension of what has been called ‘rural criminology’. However, because of its cultural and ideological baggage, the idea of ‘rural criminology’ in a neo-colonial era has become anachronistic and the field has itself often played a part in reinforcing dominant cultural constructs of space and existing power-relations. Thus, while this book seeks to situate island criminologies within existing criminological lines of inquiry, it also takes an interdisciplinary, global, and critical approach to exploring how islandness might further inflect extant criminological theorizing. This attention to the space and place of islands in criminology is timely, given the relatively recent interest in Southern, Indigenous, and decolonizing criminologies, which similarly involve a shift away from the metropole. Although this book offers first, tentative steps towards finding a place for islands in a criminology informed by ecology (with a particular focus on the relationship between people and the environment of a place), islands demand greater criminological attention into the future.
Introducing Refugee Youth: Migration, Justice and Urban Space
Authors: Backer Mattias De , Hopkins Peter , Liempt Ilse van
Published: September 2023

The introductory chapter of the book explains the overall focus on refugee youth as active agents and our interest in urban space. By putting personal and everyday geographies of refugee youth central we do not overlook structural forms of exclusion that take place but we show how young people themselves make sense of their lives in the new places of arrival. By putting their experiences centre stage we move beyond the mainstream domains, formal community or organisational settings and locations. The various chapters in the book illustrate how our focus on public space offers opportunities to explore meaningful spaces for refugee youth that include spaces that might be created by refugee youth themselves. Moreover, this collection explores the lived experiences of refugee youth in urban public space in a highly diverse range of international contexts and with specific attention to gender which allows us to illustrate how urban public space is actively produced in many different ways.
Sense of Belonging among Tibetan Refugees in India: A Case Study of the Bylakuppe Settlement in Karnataka, India
Authors: Bramwell-Grent Anne , Bailey Ajay
Published: September 2023

For over 60 years the Tibetan refugee diaspora are still residing in ‘temporary’ largely refugee settlements in India. Whereas older Tibetans often still feel a strong attachment towards their homeland, among the younger refugees, who were born in India or moved there at a young age, a more ambiguous and ambivalent sense of belonging is emerging. We examine their sense of belonging through four main topics, namely receiving society receptivity, social capital, economic integration and exposure to the host society. Thirty-nine in-depth interviews were conducted with refugees in the Bylakuppe settlement, and participant observation and photography also supplemented the interviews. The findings of this study indicate that young Tibetans are developing a sense of belonging towards Tibet, India and the West simultaneously – thereby arguing for a more temporal and comprehensive understanding of belonging.
Planetary Listening
Authors: Back Les
Published: September 2023

This chapter reflects on how the edited volume Refugee Youth: Migration, Justice and Urban Space offers an alternative to more traditional academic studies of integration by opening up a space for refugees’ own voices to be represented and heard on their own terms. It makes a case for the importance of ‘planetary listening’, in which each individual life contains the traces of a global human story. Rather than caring only for those who seem to look like us, this kind of attention opens us to the experience of displaced young people in a way that invites a more inclusive planetary consciousness. It is based on ‘fellow feeling’ and aimed at an ‘unspectacular’ human portrayal of young people seeking freer lives.
Beyond Liberty: A Republican Perspective on COVID-19 Restrictions and the Politics of Freedom
Authors: Blunt Gwilym David
Published: September 2023

It is a trite observation to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way billions of people live their daily lives. There has been an escalation of government interference in the mundane experiences of day-to-day existence. This has included limitations on travel, mask mandates and social distancing, and, of course, ‘lockdowns’. These restrictions have been criticized for the economic harm they have caused, but perhaps the more salient objection, at least for a political philosopher, is the claim that COVID-19 restrictions undermine personal liberty, freedom and individual autonomy. This seems to be the public rallying cry for many of those opposed to the restrictions, including public figures like Lord Sumption. There is a glimmer of truth in this claim, but the problem is misrepresented. The real issue is not with COVID-19 restrictions in themselves but that they are arbitrarily formulated and liable to partial enforcement. This reveals that the problem is not just one of liberty but of equality. This chapter examines and revises the liberty objection within the theory of libertarianism to make it more attuned to the problem of arbitrary power and inequality.
Beyond Authority and Governance in Israel during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Crumbling of Solidarity and the Rise of Social Inequalities
Authors: Gilbar Roy , Karako-Eyal Nili
Published: September 2023

At the beginning of February 2020, the first cases of COVID-19 infection were detected in Israel. As the number of confirmed patients increased, movement and activity restrictions were imposed on the public. While stopping the spread of the virus and almost eradicating the pandemic, the results were short-lived. The reappearance of the pandemic revealed not only the fragility of the human body but also exposed a weakening of solidarity in Israeli society. This chapter describes the weakening of the value of solidarity in Israeli society as it manifested during the pandemic. The authors claim that this phenomenon played an important role in deepening existing social inequalities. It is suggested that while the refusal to carry the costs required to stop the spreading of the pandemic affected the entire population, it had a greater impact on disadvantaged and vulnerable sectors (for example, the elderly, the disabled, low socioeconomic status individuals, women and victims of domestic violence), thus exacerbating social inequalities. The aim of this chapter is to examine the role of the Israeli law governance in responding to the pandemic by looking into and scrutinizing the protocols of meetings of various committees in the Israeli parliament that discussed the public health restrictions.
(In)Equality, Expertise and the COVID-19 Crisis: An Intersectional Analysis
Authors: Cardo Valentina , Boelle Julia
Published: September 2023

Inequality for women and BAME voices in the public arena is sadly old news and is well documented in scholarly work. It should not come as a surprise then that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, such inequality was not only reinforced but it also became the norm. This chapter is concerned with the presence (or lack thereof) of (BAME) women experts (from health officials to politicians) during the first national lockdown period (23 March to 10 May 2020) in the United Kingdom. It focuses on the daily Government press conferences, and their national press and media coverage, in order to establish the extent to which (BAME) women were allowed to speak as experts during the pandemic. Adopting an intersectional approach, this chapter argues that the lack of diversity in official Government communication during the crisis, is not only indicative of the way experts are viewed in contemporary British society. It may also discourage (BAME) women in presenting themselves as experts and having a voice in matters of the State. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the mis- and underrepresentation of diverse voices in public discourse is detrimental to an equal society and has wider democratic consequences.
Business as Usual: Inequality and Health Litigation during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil
Authors: de Vasconcelos Natalia Pires
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on judicial protection of the right to health for those incarcerated and free. In both cases, courts in Brazil had significant incentives to take the pandemic seriously and to consider its disproportionate impact on marginalized communities. For the judicial system, however, it has mostly been business as usual. Despite the pandemic, judges have been unwilling to guarantee the right to health for those imprisoned. By analysing habeas corpus decisions on petitions filed because of COVID-19 and the higher risks faced inside prisons, the chapter reveals how judges were indifferent to the public-health risks presented by overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. For those who are free, most health litigation was still presented in the form of individual cases seeking access to uncovered services and medicines. These cases followed the same patterns as before the pandemic: courts kept deciding in favour of claimants regardless of the potential disruptive effects of their decisions over public policy, including priorities related to COVID-19.
The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune
Authors: Timcke Scott
Published: September 2023

In the wake of growing unrest about economic disparities between the 1% and other classes in Western societies, this book argues that an assessment of life chances in contemporary capitalist liberal democracies has assumed a renewed urgency. There are many other factors outside of a person’s socioeconomic position that can influence life chances, such as place of birth, education and income, in addition to intersections with race, gender or ethnicity, so that the lived experience of class often has a distinctively multidimensional character. Still, the focus in this book is directed at higher levels of abstraction dealing with the political economy of life chances as a feature of life in Western capitalist liberal democracies – societies often promoted as the freest and the most equitable in the world. This is because too often debates about unfairness and inequality become squabbles about the accuracy of data and the suitability of econometric models but miss the point about ethics and exploitation; all of which distracts from reform. Through a discussion of luck egalitarianism, this book brings together the philosophies of liberalism and Marxism to demonstrate that much of what a person seeks to claim as their own is radically contingent. Irrespective of whether economic inequalities are caused by the genetic lottery of natural talents, the social lottery of opportunities to develop talents, or the market lottery where a person’s attributes become talents because they just happen to be in demand, all are inherently unjust.
Introduction
Authors: Timcke Scott
Published: September 2023

The introduction discusses how freedom comes through social and material equality, and how this status can be achieved via ‘equally promoting approaches’. It also accounts for the role of contingency in forming social inequalities in the first place, as well as for the need to account for luck in redistributive justice. Luck is intimately related to how opportunities are structured and mystified in capitalism, and how this in turn affects well-being. Given this set of concerns, the introduction attends to debates involving a mode of reasoning called luck egalitarianism, which is firmly grounded in both the classical egalitarian aspirations of non-subordination and orthodox liberal conceptions of self-determination. This ‘equally promoting approach’ focuses on the totality of the production, circulation and consumption of goods as they can be leveraged to satisfy human needs. This broader view can help analyse durable and qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrable social inequalities as well as how these inequalities are sustained institutionally and reproduced ideologically.
The Egalitarian Turn in Liberalism
Authors: Timcke Scott
Published: September 2023

Through a discussion of how social inequality is treated in the liberal view of the world, this chapter asks whether the strongest form of liberal reasoning really deserves our allegiance. By plotting key contours of liberal social theory – which include the presumption of liberty, the freedom of consciousness and the necessity of representative government – the chapter shows liberalism as emerging from a particular philosophical anthropology and metaphysics of reason. Admirably, liberals resist reducing the person to always and nothing but this or that. But liberals have not given enough attention to how capitalism and its private property regime hinder the values that liberals cherish.
Where Liberalism Falls Short
Authors: Timcke Scott
Published: September 2023

Through revisiting the thought of John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Francis Fukayama and Jennifer Welsh, among others, this chapter surveys some of the primary contours of late 20th- and early 21st-century liberalism to identify the faults in its conceptual stance. This body of thought adopts a kind of attitude to ideology that ultimately mistreats the concept, rendering it less analytically powerful than it could be. Altogether this leaves the concept depleted as far as social critique is concerned. This has dramatic, and indeed negative, consequences for the analysis of social inequality. However, the key point of the chapter is to show that even at its best, the liberal social imaginary does not have the power to leash and tame the kinds of everyday encounters that arise from capitalist social relations. The chapter concludes that liberalism needs the conceptual assistance that Marxist methods can provide if liberals are to make good on their values.
The Problem of Contingency
Authors: Timcke Scott
Published: September 2023

Due to his deep engagement with the problem of contingency, this chapter examines the scholarship of Bernard Williams. Williams advanced one of the most nuanced and subtle treatments of contingency, drawing attention to its implications for an ethical evaluation of political practices. His suspicion is that ethical commitments are not subject to a degree of reason but rather turn on inexplicable preferences. Therefore, there is little productive discussion to be had from attempting to reconcile, amalgamate or rank these preferences. That said, Williams’ pessimism in the authority of universalizing moral claims could do with a touch of ironism, as exemplified by the virtues of fortitude, wisdom, self-affirmation and labour. This is not to release either reason or experience from ethical deliberation, but rather to show that they take their orientation from humanistic impulses. The same temperament can be used to address matters of luck in political theory that deal with social inequalities that arise due to luck.
A Social Analysis of Institutional Luck
Authors: Timcke Scott
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the thought behind the inclination or disinclination to use institutional means to collectivize risk and bad luck. Through providing an overview of the distribution of luck to dispel simplistic analyses of rising inequality, as well as make the case that power and mystification are mechanisms that appeal to the idea of individual bad luck, this chapter shows how appeals to luck enable institutions to back out of welfare commitments.
Conclusion: The Tasks of Engaged Liberal Social Theory
Authors: Timcke Scott
Published: September 2023

Arising from disagreement with Rawls and Nagel, Parfit and Nussbaum, this chapter offers an alternative approach to conceptualize and to demonstrate the unfairness of exploitation predicated upon structural oppression. Drawing upon Williams’ and Cohen’s comments upon and contributions to moral and political philosophy, I point to ‘luck egalitarianism’ arguments as a more suitable model to identify, assess and direct interventions to overturn existing social inequalities. The underlying appeal of luck egalitarianism is to demonstrate that much of what a person seeks to claim as their own is contingent; what remains is the material dividends of social relations.
Political Economy of the Inclusive Labour Market Revisited: Welfare through Work in Denmark
Authors: Etherington David , Jones Martin
Published: September 2023

This chapter draws attention to the political economy of the labour market. It provides a framework for a deeper, nuanced understanding of social processes and institutional relations in and through which employer engagement is framed. The chapter outlines an analytical framework that views labour markets within welfare regimes, historically formed around class (struggle) relations, where policies are contingent upon the balance of social forces and specific forms of political struggle. The framework is deployed to examine the key elements of the Danish system of employment and skills, drawing attention to first the ways in which high trade union (TU) densities and membership make them important actors. Second, it is shown how TUs’ active involvement in social dialogue and bargaining around employment policy occurs and relatedly, third, how a developed system of collective agreements in which unions negotiate changes and improvements to welfare and skills policies has been institutionalized. Last, the chapter draws out the importance of and roles played by local government (and the local welfare state) and devolved authorities in labour market policy.
Skills, Apprenticeships and Diversity: Employer Engagement with Further and Higher Education
Authors: McGurk Patrick , Olaleye Omolola
Published: September 2023

This chapter provides a critical discussion of the principal ways in which employers in England have engaged with further and higher education since the early 2000s to improve workforce skills. The chapter proposes a typology of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ employer engagement in this area, including the predominantly weak roles of ‘purchaser’ and ‘volunteer’ as well as the stronger roles of ‘commissioner’ and ‘co-producer’. A discussion of recent apprenticeship reforms is elaborated as illustrative of the rare but strong engagement of employers as co-producers working with colleges and universities. The chapter goes on to examine wider attempts to engage employers in apprenticeships as a means of improving workforce diversity and advancing the government’s social mobility goals. This latter section of the chapter also assesses the evidence of progress in this area, showing limited success and demonstrating the piecemeal and fragmented nature of the related diversity initiatives.
The Weakest Link? Job Quality and Active Labour Market Policy in the UK
Authors: Green Anne , Sissons Paul
Published: September 2023

In a significant change to the UK social security system, the introduction of Universal Credit has seen the broadening of labour market activation to cover a larger number of population sub-groups. This change has also prompted a greater concern with employment sustainability and progression in work in active labour market policy (ALMP), as the benefit extends coverage to those in work and on low incomes. Implicit in this shift is the emergence of a greater emphasis on employment quality alongside the previously predominant focus on the quantity of employment opportunities. Concurrently, ‘good work’ is increasingly prominent in the policy discourse in the UK. Yet within a work-first system in which jobseekers are encouraged, and can be mandated, to accept available opportunities, there is only limited scope for public employment services to engage with a good work agenda, or to exert upwards institutional pressure on job quality. A context of labour and skills shortages in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic offers ALMP an opportunity to redress this situation. It also opens up questions about the relative prospects for progression in the internal labour market vis-à-vis the external labour market.
Opening the Black Box: Promoting Employer Engagement at the Street Level of Employment Services
Authors: Dall Tanja , Larsen Flemming , Madsen Mikkel Bo
Published: September 2023

This chapter analyses how the public authorities involve employers in the work of hiring unemployed individuals who have social, mental and physical challenges and, in doing so, interact with employers and their organizations. To do this, it elaborates on existing conceptualizations of employer engagement and links employer engagement to the aims of strengthening the ability of the disadvantaged unemployed to work. The analysis shows how employer engagement is not set and stable but continually created, developed and maintained at the street level – local employment services. Empirically, the analysis in this chapter is based on a study of the day-to-day work of the staff in Danish public employment services collaborating with employers on workplace-based employment policies for disadvantaged groups of unemployed. The qualitative dataset consists of interviews with job consultants, ethnographic observations of municipal employer engagement staff, interviews with unemployed individuals and, to some extent, observations within actual workplaces.