bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Politics of Freedom
Authors: Kolchin Peter
Published: January 2025

In struggling for their desired self-government, former slaves and former serfs sought to maximize their collective autonomy. Both also – for the first time – became part of the larger body politic, though in very different political systems. Whereas in Russia, emancipation made possible an expansion of peasants’ customary communal self-rule, in the South, the political changes of Reconstruction offered revolutionary possibilities for creating a republican society with equal civil rights for all and equal political rights for men. In the South, too, those changes also generated counterrevolutionary terror and violence from defenders of white supremacy. Reconstruction legislation facilitated Black leaders’ entry into full-fledged electoral politics, a context wholly missing in autocratic Russia, where peasants remained subjects, not citizens. Former serfs and slaves negotiated a patchwork of new labor relations within a context where former owners had most of the power. In Russia, those negotiations focused on redemption agreements that provided land allotments to peasants, but created redemption debt that did not finally end until 1907.
Interpreting Emancipation
Authors: Kolchin Peter
Published: January 2025

Asking whether Reconstruction and the Great Reforms were failures requires differentiating between short-term and long-term consequences and considering the contexts in which they occurred. Paradoxically, emancipation could be both revolutionary and exploitative; clearly, it brought fundamental changes to both societies. Yet while there were significant changes in the lives of freedpeople as well as in the lives of their former masters, forty years after emancipation, a conservative reaction—in Russia, the return of autocratic rule and in the South a violent, racist counterrevolution—characterized the continuing struggle between elites and freedpeople. In both, the balance gradually tipped toward elites. The result was widespread disillusionment as radical reform proved disappointing to different segments of society for different reasons.
Conceptualising public space for governance: a complex shared common good
Authors: Magalhães Claudio De , Sieh Louie
Published: January 2025

This is the first of three conceptual chapters discussing the nature of public space and public space governance. The chapter proposes a definition of public space beyond idealised archetypal views by exploring considerations about public space as a complex common good with many different attributes with varying characteristics of private, public, club and common pool goods. This, as well as the way those attributes are shared and consumed, defines what it is to be ‘public’. The chapter anchors this discussion into historical, geographical and cultural contexts, and looks at the conceptual and practical issues surrounding the provision of common goods in cities in the 20th and early 21st centuries, how it came into being, and how it has changed over that period, and especially the changing relationship between the public, private and community/voluntary sectors.
The Rise of Mental Vulnerability at Work
Authors: Väänänen Ari
Published: January 2025

Mental health emerged as a public concern and a problem at work in the late 1900s and early 2000s. This book formulates a novel history-based approach that diverges from ordinary frameworks of occupational health and mental health by developing the perspective of mental vulnerability. It examines the contribution of both cultural (for example, medicalization, psychologization) and realism-oriented (for example, precarization, epidemiological transition) perspectives in understanding the rise of mental vulnerabilities and examines how these processes have taken shape as part of historical agency. The book analyses the formation of mental vulnerability over the decades using materials produced by occupational stress sciences, the media and occupational health physicians, and by investigating long-term changes in different occupations. It also reflects the underlying processes among young workers and the role of gendered work and subjectivity in the processes of mental vulnerability. The book suggests that we are witnessing the spread of subjective experiences of scarcity, the transformation of workplace challenges into rituals of mental health and the expansion of wellness medicine. The book is based on research carried out and led by Professor Väänänen over the past 15 years. It combines archival, interview and register research, and uses frameworks from various scientific disciplines.
The undercover policing scandal
Authors: Schlembach Raphael
Published: January 2025

This chapter serves as an introduction to the spycops scandal, starting with the exposure of Mark Kennedy, who had infiltrated environmental activists. It details findings from several reviews into the practices of undercover policing, and the information provided by a whistleblower, which convinced the Home Secretary at the time to establish a statutory inquiry. The political undercover units targeted left-wing and anti-racist activism and used sexual relationships to build trust and cover identities. The chapter thus analyses these units in relation to the allegations of institutional racism and institutionalised sexism.
Dirty data and devices of dis/closure
Authors: Schlembach Raphael
Published: January 2025

This chapter draws on the work of Gary Marx (1984) and William Walters (2021) to analyse the Undercover Policing Inquiry as a holder of ‘dirty data’ and its processes as maintaining secrecy through ‘devices of dis/closure’. It seeks to go beyond a reading of the Inquiry as simply maintaining the police’s secrets. Disclosure and secrecy are here seen as being in a more complex relationship with each other. Public inquiries employ various tools, or ‘devices of dis/closure’ in Walters’s terms, to mediate competing political, moral and technical demands for data management. Reflecting on each of these, the chapter examines how the Inquiry responded to the conflict between the state and non-state participants and how victims of undercover police abuse pressured both the police and the Inquiry to allow them to access their intelligence files.
Suitable for global consumption: turning German dual training into a portable policy idea
Authors: Fontdevila Clara , Valiente Oscar
Published: January 2025

Over the past decade, dual training (DT) has consolidated its status as a travelling policy idea. Born in German-speaking countries, DT combines school-based education with highly regulated work-based training and generates interest among a growing number of countries. The challenges encountered by policy transfer dynamics behind the spread of DT have sparked considerable debate, but much less has been said on the origins of DT as a portable, export-ready policy. Likewise, while there is growing understanding on why recipient countries might be interested in DT, there is less clarity on how this policy idea acquired global currency. In light of this, this chapter examines the articulation of the German model of DT as a mobile policy idea. Building on documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, and informed by von Gliszczynski and Leisering’s work on the articulation of global social policy, the chapter identifies a number of enabling and limiting factors that explain the (relative) spread of the DT policy idea. Particular attention is paid to the discursive and institutional efforts made by the German polity to promote DT. In so doing, the chapter contributes to shedding light on the role of bilateral cooperation in the production of global policies.
Towards global gender equality in education? Economic incentives, global cultures and international organizations’ policy recommendations
Authors: Besche-Truthe Fabian , Martens Kerstin , Niemann Dennis , Windzio Michael
Published: January 2025

This chapter analyses the impact of the global diffusion of equal pay laws (EPLs) on the relative enrolment rates of women in secondary education. First, we aim to explain the policy movement of EPLs and then the impact this movement had on countries’ female students. We contemplate international organizations as decisive actors since they set global normative standards regarding EPLs. They foster the idea of gender equality with an individualistic perspective on skill formation and human rights. We theorize this neoliberal discourse to influence the uptake and, crucially, the impact of EPLs across countries with widely differing economic, historical and cultural traits. We show in our mixed-methods study that: (1) equal pay of men and women is an important issue for the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the context of education policy; (2) the worldwide diffusion of EPLs indicates an isomorphic trend, which is mediated by “cultural spheres”; and (3) that EPLs can provide incentives for girls to participate in secondary education, but the effect of EPLs on participation rates is also mediated by different “cultural spheres.” We thus consider policy movement as a phenomenon itself and simultaneously analyze the de facto outcomes of this specific policy movement.
Bibliographic ethnography of global education policy documents: theoretical and methodological foundations for researching the work of citations in (con)text
Authors: Edwards D. Brent , Wang Chenyu
Published: January 2025

This chapter makes an intervention in the literature on knowledge mobilization and global education policy by presenting a novel approach to studying policy movement. The central purpose of this approach – labelled bibliographic ethnography – is to highlight the work that bibliographic references do in the context of academic and organizational texts, while also keeping one eye on the wider implications of the productive nature of such citations beyond the limits of the text itself. The approach brings an ethnographic sensitivity to the analysis of the role that citations play in the sense that it asks: what kinds of statements or claims are enabled in the context of academic and organizational texts by the invocation of a given reference? As will be explained, this analysis is then placed within a second level of reflection where the researcher assesses the work of citations in relation to the dominant features of the sociohistorical and political-economic context. Analysis of this kind necessarily has a political dimension, because the underlying phenomenon itself is political. That is, the issue of who to cite and how to interpret and instrumentalize existing research has political implications, even when authors do not have open political intentions with their research.
Assembling New Public Management: actors, networks and projects
Authors: Wilkins Andrew W. , Collet-Sabé Jordi , Esper Tomás , Gobby Brad , Grimaldi Emiliano
Published: January 2025

In this chapter we adopt the analytic of “assemblage” (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011) to document how New Public Management (NPM) has been mobilized and recontextualized within different nation states over time through the unique combination of discrete yet tangled and globally diffuse political movements and configurations. To make sense of these issues empirically, we trace multiple iterations of NPM in five countries: Argentina, Australia, England, Italy and Spain. We focus our attention on the intermediating actors, networks and projects that have crystallized to produce different possibilities for the emergence of NPM within these countries and reflect on their comparable yet uneven development as dynamic expressions of governance assemblages.
Dismantling colonial time as the order and condition of comparison: a critique of modernist secularist historiography of higher education in Turkey
Authors: Tunc Yasin
Published: January 2025

This chapter is an attempt to trace the legacy of colonial time in the secular historiography of the madrasa and the modern higher education institutions in Turkey. The guiding questions of inquiry are: (1) how have secular historians narrated attempts at policy and institutional borrowing of scientific ideas and higher education institutions in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire?; and (2) what are the conditions that make it possible for secular historians to be able to conceptually juxtapose two institutions that have historically belonged to two different discursive systems, temporal regimes and institutional traditions? Adopting a philosophical and historical interpretive framework, the chapter puts forward the argument that the system of reasoning of secular historiography relies heavily on a secular conceptualization of time inherited from the Western social theory of “modernization” and “modernity,” wherein there is a particular temporal order and organization of the historical experience. To problematize this ordering of historical experience, this chapter engages with recent revisionist historiography and argues that Ottoman reformers were operating in multiple temporalities in the 19th century when transferring and translating scientific concepts and institutions of Western origin. Operating in multiple temporalities has to be seen as an ontologically necessary condition for the reformers, which was already a common practice in both Islamic jurisprudence and theology. Overall, this chapter problematizes the uncritical adoption of Western, secular time as a condition of possibility and a background grid of intelligibility for global policy movement, which otherwise incessantly reproduces the conditions and aspirations of Western modernity, occluding other onto-epistemologies.
Introduction to the volume: themes, issues and chapter synopses
Authors: Simpson Paul , Ghisyawan Krystal Nandini , Harley Debra A. , Shah Shanon
Published: January 2025

This introductory chapter outlines the need for a critically focused edited collection as a recuperative project that sheds light on a highly under-researched set of issues: later life sexualities in parts of the globe obscured by the global North’s/West’s obsession with itself and misunderstanding of (intersecting) ageing, genders and sexualities in the global South and East. It highlights how the chapters draw on a plethora of theorising (decolonial, poststructuralist/queer, phenomenological, feminist and Marxist-feminist). The chapter points out that the book is organised around themes of in/visibility; older women questioning later life though inter- and intragenerational accounts; and sexual agency through fantasy, erotic storytelling and pleasure. It also questions the rigidity of Western binaries (of progressive/regressive sexual mores) and provides a synopsis of each contribution and what each adds to knowledge.
Under the orhni : intimacy and near-invisibility among older Indo-Trinidadian queer men
Authors: Ghisyawan Krystal Nandini , Kissoon Marcus
Published: January 2025

The orhni symbolises tradition, privacy, secrecy and mystery, tropes that are also associated with Indian gender and sexuality. This chapter explores how these tropes intersect in the lives of three Indo-Trinidadian queer men over 50, each with different education, geographic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. We additionally spoke with one Afro-Trinidadian queer male activist. We examine how invisibility presents constraints and opportunities for experiencing intimacy and forming intimate bonds, especially when respectability politics plays an active role within the men’s lives. Their stories highlight how their race and ethnic identifications contribute to their sexual subjectivities, their practices of non-disclosure, respect for family values, how they produce community and explore their secret love, sex and dating encounters. We ask, how does this near-invisible population envision intimacy? What does it mean to them, and how do they actualise it?
Older kinnars , ageism and sexuality during the COVID-19 pandemic
Authors: अरोड़ा Anushkaa Arora अनुष्का
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores how kinnars and later life sexuality in India have been neglected, as unspeakable subjects since the colonial encounter. It covers how responses to their ageing, gendered sexuality renders them more vulnerable to mental health difficulties and even, as a consequence, deterioration of physical health. This chapter also focuses on what is it like to live as an older kinnar, and the pressures they face in a society that marginalises them. In particular, and in view of the dearth of studies addressing older kinnars in India (and other global regions), the author seeks to understand how age played a vital role in shaping the sexual outlook of the kinnars of northern India during the COVID-19 outbreak. Using Colaizzi’s phenomenological approach, the author identifies and describes the intersecting forms of aged, gendered and sexual stigmatisation and their impacts on older kinnars’ accounts of sexuality. The findings are based on semi-structured interviews with 20 kinnars who range from 23 to 68-years-old.
Sexual fantasies and older, Indigenous Purépecha women: sociocultural constraints and possibilities
Authors: Vega Cuauhtémoc Sanchez
Published: January 2025

This chapter evidences historically rooted constraints on sexual expression while focusing on the sexual agency that can be mobilised by older Purépecha women (north-western Mexico). It considers how pre-Hispanic, pre-Imperial and heteropatriarchal Purépecha culture, where women were a means of exchange, has resonated through history and inter-articulated with (equally patriarchal) Spanish settler colonialism to reinforce regulation of (older) women’s sexuality in ways that continue to deny them pleasure and autonomy. In postcolonial (or neocolonial) times, women’s oppression has been cemented by modernist, monogamous romantic love that reinforces ideas of women as property. Such thinking recalls feminist observations on how women in the global South have had to reckon with colonialism and patriarchy shared by colonised men and their colonial oppressors. Drawing on interviews and a workshop involving a total of 20 women aged 50–82, this chapter draws on critical feminist analysis in asserting women’s sexual autonomy. It is suggestive of a decolonial sensibility in highlighting the value of Indigenous, older women’s sexual knowledges via fantasies, ‘suggesting new ethics of pleasure … pointing towards a more convivial model of sexual morality’ capable of transcending patriarchy. The chapter resonates with feminist postcolonial analysis that envisions productive, emancipatory dialogues between Western and Indigenous thought.
Sex, intimacy and older life in Muslim contexts
Authors: Shah Shanon
Published: January 2025

There is a growing body of work, including by queer Muslims, that challenges the simplistic notion that Islam inherently condemns sexual diversity. Some of these works also question Eurocentric conceptions of gender, sexuality and LGBTQ rights. Yet there is a paucity of analysis from the perspective of sexual intimacy in older life (or other generational dynamics) within this scholarly terrain. This chapter contributes to this body of scholarship by applying the combined lens of sex, intimacy and age to a survey of some key Islamic narratives, including a close reading of two pre-modern Islamic sex manuals – The Delight of Hearts (from the 13th century CE) and The Perfumed Garden (from the 15th century CE). This approach can expand and enhance our understanding of how gendered and sexual relationships were expressed and regulated in Muslim societies, and the implications of this for contemporary studies of Islam, gender and sexuality.
Regime transitions and institutional weakness: the case of police reform in Poland in the early 1990s
Authors: Piotrowska Barbara Maria , Szkurłat Izabela , Szydłowska Magdalena
Published: January 2025

This chapter argues that institutional weakness is not only a function of weak fundamentals but can also be caused by a shift in the goals of the institution. In particular, if weak institutions are those that fail to work as intended, regime transitions can create weak institutions by changing the very objectives of the state. To illustrate how a relatively strong institution can quickly turn into a weak one during a regime transition, this chapter considers police reform in the early 1990s Poland, a typical case of a police state that has transitioned into a democracy. We discuss how the challenges faced by the reformers relate to four aspects associated with institutional weakness, framing them temporally as challenges stemming from the past (authoritarian legacies, including low trust in the police and personnel issues), from the present (the change in objectives and skill incompatibility), and from new challenges (the increase in crime).
Technological mediation of biographical research and its risks
Authors: Stachowiak Jerzy
Published: January 2025

This chapter argues that technological mediation of interviewing comes with specific risks for biographical research. Firstly, technology appears to be helpful in a time of social distancing. However, it also affects the balance between three types of control that are often considered to be unique features of biographical research: the control exercised by the narrator, by the researcher and by the narrative itself. By affecting this balance, technology comes with a risk of turning the biographical interview into a ‘mere’ interview. Secondly, spatial isolation invites biographical research to seek its validation not in its methodological specificity but in the ethical idea of ‘giving voice’. However, this idea assumes the legitimacy of the rhetoric of emancipation, which itself has become a problematic phenomenon of our times. Basing biographical studies on the idea of ‘giving voice’ means that the interviewing process becomes a means of doing what is done in many other spheres of social activity anyway.
Introduction: From the sociology to the science of housework
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: January 2025

The Science of Housework is about an international movement to make housework a scientific subject and to introduce household science courses into higher education on a par with other sciences. The book charts the author’s journey from writing about the sociology of housework in the 1970s to studying the science of housework today. It considers the history of housework and housewives, and the reasons for which the household science movement has been neglected in this history. Feminist scholars have mostly dismissed the household science movement as oppressive to women. The prominence in anthropological work of ideas about purity and danger has diverted attention from the public and private health importance of housework, and it is this role which underpins everyday life today.
Gender and germs: housework today
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers a theme that is firmly embedded in any story about housework: gender. Unpaid care work is one of the most glaring manifestations of gender inequality world-wide. Everywhere women do more housework than men and housework tasks are gendered into his and hers. The chapter explores another subject, germs, that is a topic of crucial importance to the household science movement. Highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, personal and domestic hygiene is vital to the maintenance of health and wellbeing. Scientific research on cleanliness hides in obscure places but it tells us much that we need to know about effective techniques for keeping ourselves and our environments clean. Kitchens, especially, are dangerous places.
Teaching girls about housework
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: January 2025

The inclusion of cooking, sewing, cleaning, washing and other forms of domestic labour in the school curriculum for girls laid the groundwork for the introduction of these subjects into higher education. The schoolgirl’s body was subject to moral and physical regulation as her character was being prepared for its adult mission of housekeeping. Around the world, a huge variety of different kinds of institutions evolved to teach domestic economy: state primary and secondary schools; private schools; evening schools; continuation schools and classes; special housekeeping, cookery or needlework schools; and peripatetic teachers lugging their own stoves around the country to show rural housewives how to cook more efficiently. All this, for the girls themselves, was a lesson in the fabric of patriarchy: through their saucepans and scrubbing brushes teachers hammered home the notion of domestic life as a female responsibility.
Sweeping science into the home
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: January 2025

This chapter engages with several important preludes to the academic household science movement. The emergence of germ theory revolutionised the scientific underpinnings of housework. As germs appeared on the landscape of conversations about housework, servants increasingly disappeared. This created a stage on which women reformers’ espousal of sanitary reform could more easily penetrate the private world of the home. At the close of the 19th century, the strengthened scientific rationale for housework formed the basis of a ground-breaking meeting of household science reformers that took place at Lake Placid in the United States. The Lake Placid convention was a moment that launched all kinds of energetic currents and ideas that helped to propel household science into the world of higher education.
Alice through the cooking class
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: January 2025

By 1928, King’s College of Household and Social Science was a thriving institution with its own architect-designed set of buildings in Campden Hill, Kensington, a highly motivated student and staff community and a full complement of household science courses. This chapter looks at how it evolved from its modest beginnings to an independent college of London University. This is a story of energetic fundraising and networking, and of the curious intervention of the Haldane Report on London University in 1913 which split household science from its feeder arts and sciences disciplines. It is a case study in the struggles that household science faced when it tried to claim a place in the academic world.
White subjects: domestic science in the colonies and other places
Authors: Oakley Ann
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on racism, imperialism and colonialism as creeds that have done their part in influencing the domestic science movement. The chapter is also about the wide reach of the Euro-American ideology and practice of home science: how it was exported to other places, including Canada, New Zealand, Japan and territories of what used to be the British Empire. Euro-American-derived values and practices didn’t necessarily agree with the habits of the cultures into which attempts were made to insert them. Nonetheless, the transfer of new knowledge about germs and bacteria and nutritional science to other cultural contexts did benefit population health. The ‘academic kitchens’ that seeded themselves on the university campuses of different countries were participants in a general process of colonisation and hegemony that is certainly not unique to the field of household science.
Not in the family: trans people’s experiences of family relationships and the implications for support in later life
Authors: Hafford-Letchfield Trish , Cocker Christine , McCormack Keira , Manning Rebecca
Published: January 2025

This chapter revisits findings from a systematic review on trans parenting which contained limited findings on grandparenting (Hafford-Letchfield et al, 2019). The authors expand the themes to examine the potential implications for trans people in accessing and developing support in later life, particularly where conflict and transgression impact on future care planning. The authors draw on two case studies from empirical research which illustrate barriers and enablers in developing support networks with birth and chosen family. Honest and respectful communication between individuals is a key factor in building and sustaining relationships. Messages for professional practice with trans people in later life include: the importance of professionals addressing their own transphobia; acknowledging the individuality of trans people’s lives; supporting trans people’s relationships with family members; including trans people in developing and improving all family services; and helping trans people build links with social and community networks that understand their needs.
What is being done to support trans older people facing intimate and domestic abuse?
Authors: Hafford-Letchfield Trish , McCormack Keira
Published: January 2025

Trans older people are a group of ‘hidden victims’ due to very little literature on their experiences (Gelles, 1997, p 96), and there is a dearth of empirical work on trans people in later life. Trans people’s intimate and familial relationships are least explored in relation to intimate and domestic abuse and the environments in which this takes place. This lack of visibility of older people who are gender diverse, the failure to ask or record gender identity when people are accessing or using support services and/or the fear of sharing information by trans and non-binary individuals with professionals and service providers are all contributing factors in the failure in being able to screen, recognise and assess intimate partner violence and domestic abuse (DA). This chapter draws on the sparse but important body of work on trans DA along with some of the broader literature on identity abuse. This is used to articulate what can be learned to support trans people better in later life who have or may be experiencing DA. It highlights the epistemological, political and social context for trans DA and looks at barriers and challenges in identifying, reporting and responding to DA for trans people in later life given the lack of research and practice guidance in health and social care. We illustrate the barriers they may face in help seeking and summarise key points for informing improved practice in both prevention and interventions with older trans people in health and social care as well as some pointers for further research.
End-of-life care needs and considerations for older trans people
Authors: Almack Kathryn , Warnes Olivia , Kane Eloise
Published: January 2025

This chapter highlights nuanced considerations facing older trans people at the end of life to inform current thinking and promote further research. Research evidence suggests that trans people often face additional barriers and vulnerabilities at the end of life, including the handling of memorialisation. Trans people also report anxieties related to past experiences of exclusion and discrimination, around points of disclosure and over becoming dependent on others to meet their care needs. LGBT end-of-life care research has grown significantly in recent years. However, this has involved few trans participants and even fewer non-binary people. This lacuna in research evidence also means we have scant knowledge about positive end-of-life care experiences of this population. More research is needed to enhance inclusion of trans and non-binary participants and explore intersectionality to expand our understandings in this area. In turn, this will help to inform evidence-based practice to ensure services are accessible and safe for this population.
Conclusion: Looking ahead for enabling trans-inclusive and affirming practice
Authors: Willis Paul , Toze Michael , Hafford-Letchfield Trish
Published: January 2025

This final chapter revisits the ‘big takeaway messages’ for health, community and social care practitioners that are woven across the book and identifies future directions in research for supporting trans people in later life and developing trans-inclusive research and practice. In relation to improving care experiences across health and social care systems, a resounding message is the importance of developing and delivering a person-centred, person-led approach to care that is collaborative and centred on the wishes and preferences of older trans people as the experts on their lives. The chapter concludes by setting out key dimensions for enabling trans-inclusive and affirming practice and services.
Introduction
Authors: Kehl Katharina
Published: January 2025

This chapter introduces the main questions that drive the overall enquiry of the book, focusing on the mobilization of LGBTQ rights in nationalist projects of (non-)belonging, the role played by racialization in these projects and the ways in which they create grids of intelligibility through boundary making. It covers the empirical context, the methodological approach and the underlying theoretical concepts that guide the analysis and discusses the main contributions and delimitations. Finally, it gives an outline of the book’s structure.
Homonationalism Revisited: Gay Rights and Queer Complexities
Authors: Kehl Katharina
Published: January 2025

This chapter provides an in-depth introduction to the concepts of homonormativity and homonationalism and asks how we can continue to develop these concepts in order to maintain their analytical relevance. It looks at how the two concepts have developed from their initial formulation as they have entered different empirical contexts and new academic disciplines and connects them to discussions about LGBTQ rights as part of the international human rights discourse. It argues that by connecting new perspectives to core aspects of the original critique, we will be able to better account for the complexities and messiness of contemporary queer positionalities as they relate to various exclusive inclusions, as well as for the question of which queer bodies can and cannot afford to ‘not want rights’. Specifically, it draws on Cynthia Weber’s plural logics of and/or and Rahul Rao’s writing on queer temporalities in postcolonial settings.
Theoretical Explorations I: Boundary Making and Intelligibility
Authors: Kehl Katharina
Published: January 2025

This chapter introduces two of the main concepts underlying the analysis of the book: boundary making and intelligibility. Boundary making enables a theoretical engagement with the discursive-performative creation of communities of (non-)belonging that characterizes the ways in which LGBTQ rights are mobilized in constructions of Swedishness. The concept grids of intelligibility attends to notions of identity and subjectivity created by boundary-making processes and the need to appear or present oneself in certain ways in order to be eligible for belonging to a certain community. It enables a critical discussion of the necessity of becoming intelligible and the limitations this imposes and explores how intelligibilities are multiple and fluid providing opportunities for contestation and re-signification. The chapter connects foundational literature from different fields in order to conceptualize the relationship between projects of (homo)nationalist boundary making and the grids of intelligibility these projects draw upon and (re)produce.
The How To: Queer and Feminist Methodology
Authors: Kehl Katharina
Published: January 2025

Based on feminist and queer research approaches, this chapter discusses methodological aspects such as site selection, data generation and data analysis as well as the ethical challenges that come with being a queer researcher researching ‘queer stuff’. It includes a section on theoretical aspects of discourse and visual analysis, and it also reflects on the process of writing as a crucial part of the analytical process.
Pride Järva: LGBTQ People in Right-Wing Nationalist Discourses
Authors: Kehl Katharina
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses one specific way in which right-wing political actors employ LGBTQ issues and established homonationalist narratives in their nationalist boundary making in order to exclude racialized Others. By analysing the event Pride Järva, and in particular a speech delivered by Sjunnesson on the occasion of Pride Järva 2016, it shows how LGBTQ rights are used to construct and reproduce notions of tolerant and progressive Europeanness vis-à-vis a threatening Islamic and racialized Other. I argue that this has implications not only for constructions of who belongs and does not belong within boundaries of Swedishness; it also draws upon as well as reinforces specific notions of who is and who is not intelligible as ‘the right kind of queer’ within these boundaries. While right-wing actors share certain narratives with other political actors, their opposition to LGBTQ rights and continued stigmatization of LGBTQ people as internal non-heteronormative, non-cisnormative Others sets them apart.
Conclusions and Ways Ahead
Authors: Kehl Katharina
Published: January 2025

This chapter takes a concluding look at what this book set out to do, summarizes the central findings and provides suggestions for ways ahead, both with regard to activist action and future research avenues.
The overall analysis shows how Swedishness is constructed with explicit reference to the recognition and protection of LGBTQ people. These boundary-making processes are profoundly racialized, relying crucially on the construction of racialized Others as a threat. Collective constructions of (non-)belonging through boundary making both draw upon and enable normative grids of intelligibility, creating ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of queers. At the same time, being-made-intelligible is complicated by the activism of particularly LGBTQ activists racialized non-White. The book’s findings therefore support activist claims towards a continued need for the protection and support of LGBTQ rights and LGBTQ people within contexts that are built around notions of LGBTQ-friendliness while also opening up for broader discussions regarding the inevitable instability of any attempt at boundary making around issues of sexuality and gender.
Introduction
Authors: Leoni Zeno
Published: January 2025

On 18–19 March 2021, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met senior Chinese officials, including Blinken’s counterpart Wang Yi, at a summit in Anchorage. Observers from all over the world hoped that bilateral relations would improve after their deterioration under the previous administration of Donald J. Trump. Instead, the Anchorage summit was an ill-tempered one characterized by US protests over repression in Hong Kong and the persecution of Xinjiang’s Uighur population, and Chinese rebukes over the US’ domineering and hegemonic behaviour. This meeting indicated that worsening diplomatic relations between Washington DC and Beijing were not purely the product of Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda (let alone his erratic conduct of foreign affairs and his often racist and Sinophobic outbursts on camera and on Twitter); there were also structural factors behind Sino-American tensions and the relationship between the US and China was now comparable to that between the US and the Soviet Union during the latter half of the 20th century (McCurry 2021; BBC Two 2021). This was confirmed by the recent Interim National Security Strategy, in which Biden argued that China ‘is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system’ (The White House 2021, 8). Indeed, the Anchorage fallout was not the only one in the post-Trump era. In December of the same year, at the Beijing Winter Olympics, the Biden administration announced a diplomatic boycott as a reaction to China’s ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses, to which the Chinese authorities responded that US diplomats were not even invited in the first place.
Coopetition in International Relations and the New Cold War: A Review
Authors: Leoni Zeno
Published: January 2025

This chapter builds on a definition of Cold War to explore International Relations theory, in search of an approach that could make sense of the coexistence of both competition and cooperation or restraint in great power relations.In particular, this chapter will seek to understand how the coexistence between competition and cooperation, but also restraint, has been taken into account in International Relations scholarship. In this regard, this chapter argues that there does not appear to be, in International Relations theory, an approach that is especially focused on explaining the coexistence of competition and cooperation, or competition and restraint, or even conflict and peace. Here, the book seeks to close the gap by investigating what realism and liberalism have to say about this aspect of international politics. As an alternative, the chapter articulates the concept of an economy–security conundrum.Furthermore, the chapter includes a review of the literature of debates on US–China relations, outlining competing schools of thought on the New Cold War.
US and Chinese Grand Strategies: History and Drivers of a Marriage of Convenience
Authors: Leoni Zeno
Published: January 2025

Chapter 3 zooms in on the conceptual and historical fundamentals of US–China relations. This is necessary to equip the reader with more precise tools to understand the contradictory coexistence of cooperation and competition, and of economic and security interests, as was shown in the previous chapter. While the liberal order provides the context to these contradictions, this chapter shows that US and Chinese grand strategies, over many decades, have come to embody such a tension, as they sought in very different ways to rise and master international relations in a world order deeply impacted by capitalism. Consequently, this tension has emerged in the contemporary history of US–China diplomatic relations, that is, since the rapprochement of 1972 until today, when Washington and Beijing were capable of taking major steps forward from both an economic and diplomatic perspective while important differences, for instance on political systems and on Taiwan, remained.
Between Competition and Restraint: The Implications of Weaponized Economic Interdependence on US–China Relations
Authors: Leoni Zeno
Published: January 2025

The purpose of this chapter is to unpack the geopolitical impact of interdependence on US–China relations and explore how this is the source of both tensions and deterrence. Ultimately, this demonstrates that interdependence is not a harmonious relationship but is characterized by relations of power. Furthermore, the first part of the chapter shows that interdependence between the US and China is uneven, to the extent that in some areas the US leads while in others China does.Considering this situation, the chapter puts forward the argument that the idea of limiting interdependence or even pursuing decoupling between the US and China has been, to varying degrees and in different ways, one possible option pursued by both governments throughout the 2010s. This is particularly apparent in the case of the US, but also, more tacitly, with China.
Introduction
Authors: Twum-Danso Imoh Afua
Published: January 2025

The introduction outlines the rationale underpinning this volume which can be attributed to both the personal and the academic. In particular, it reviews existing portrayals of childhoods in contexts in the South, examines the reasons behind this and illuminates the concerns this raises for both the study of childhoods and children’s rights in the Global South as well as the North. It calls for the need for a more holistic approach to the study of Southern childhoods and children’s rights realization and demonstrates how this volume, with its focus on Ghana, contributes to developing this approach. Finally it outlines the structure of the book, providing a breakdown of the focus of each chapter as well as summarizes the research studies from which data presented in the volume are based.
Tracing the Western Origins of Global Children’s Rights Discourses
Authors: Twum-Danso Imoh Afua
Published: January 2025

While the notion of children’s rights is now recognized as a meaningful concept, it has to be acknowledged that the concept has its roots in developments that took place in Western European and North American societies. Therefore, this chapter provides a historical account of the development of the modern concept of childhood which underpins dominant children’s rights. Specifically, it provides an overview of the transformations that took place in understandings of childhood and their position in society between the medieval period to the early 20th century in Western European society, with a focus on developments taking place in Britain in particular. It highlights the role of the formal education system in the process as well as the role of middle- and upper-class elites in attempts to universalize the emerging concept of modern childhood across all classes. It ends by highlighting the increasing role of government in child welfare discussions, which was instrumental in creating a shift from child saving to children’s rights.
Global Children’s Rights Discourses: Imperialistic, Irrelevant and Inapplicable to Southern Contexts?
Authors: Twum-Danso Imoh Afua
Published: January 2025

Given its roots in developments that took place in Western Europe and North America from the 18th century onwards, much of the literature on children’s rights in Southern contexts have centred around exploring the dissonance between the concept of children’s rights and the principles underpinning social organization and understandings of childhood in diverse contexts in non-Western societies. However, as a result of the social transformations that have affected many societies in the South over several hundred years, some of which were closely intertwined with transformations taking place in Western Europe and North America, this chapter has two functions. First, it provides an account of the tensions between dominant children’s rights principles and contexts in the South, with a particular focus on exploring how concepts such as individualism and chronological age are at odds with key organizing principles in societies in sub-Saharan Africa. Second, it moves beyond narratives of dissonance and demonstrates the synergies that exist between attitudes to, and experiences of, children’s rights. To explain the factors that have resulted in this plurality, it examines a number of factors, including culture and its fluidity which have been significantly shaped by phenomena such as colonialism and formal education.
Historical Approaches to Child Welfare in Ghana
Authors: Twum-Danso Imoh Afua
Published: January 2025

In order to highlight the variable ways dominant children’s rights discourses intersect with the realities of different groups of children, this volume focuses on Ghana, the first country to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In order to understand the plurality that this variability produces in this context it is first important to take a long historical view to child welfare and the emergence of children’s rights as a framework to guide policy interventions and public debates in this context. As a result, this chapter provides a historical overview which foregrounds approaches to child welfare in the country now known as Ghana in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods. Specifically, it illuminates the extent to which diverse actors in charge of child welfare in this context devised a range of strategies to protect children’s welfare or facilitate their development. However, at the same time it shows that at various stages of the country’s history, the search for securing the welfare of the kinship group/community or the state resulted in poorer or adverse welfare outcomes for, primarily, children.