bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Obstructive jaundice secondary to hepatic hilar tuberculosis without pulmonary involvement: Biliary Tuberculosis
Authors: Kloub Mohammad N. , Elfert Khaled , Elnajjar Ahmed , Alnasarat Ahmad , Alhadidi Ghaith , Anwar Atheer , Atiyat Raed
Published: January 2024

Tuberculosis (TB) is primarily a respiratory infection with huge mortality and morbidity worldwide. Extrapulmonary TB infection is common, affecting lymph nodes, pleura, and abdomen, but the primary biliary presentation without lung involvement is exceedingly rare. We report on a 38-year-old male patient who presented with isolated obstructive jaundice secondary to TB infection. This case highlights the importance of considering TB infection in the differential diagnosis of obstructive jaundice, especially in the endemic area. We also provide a literature review on TB infection, mainly in the biliary tract.
The transition to care
Authors: Brett Bethany Morgan
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the experience of transitioning into long-term care. It looks at how, despite careful discussions and conflicting opinions about whether a parent should or could go into residential care, in most cases decisions to move are beyond a family’s control and accelerated due to a rapid, unexpected decline in health. Choosing a care facility often feels overwhelming so this chapter outlines some of the care options and the different trajectories that older people follow into care. It also shows that there is often resistance against going into long-term care as a result of fears around loss of agency, dependency, and end of life care.
Distinctly indistinct: generic skills and the unique student
Authors: Telling Kathryn
Published: January 2024

This chapter brings together a series of apparently disparate concerns that are often raised about higher education today, as well as this cohort of students, and to which liberal arts degrees are often presented as the answer. First, these have to do with competences: what are the specific attributes that general higher education should instil to prepare students not only for work, but for life? Second, given the fees that students in England pay, to what extent should institutions provide distinct degrees that reflect students’ individualities (‘giving students what they want’)? Finally, given that more and more young people are attending university in order to study more and more general degrees, how can individuals continue to stand out on the job market? It is argued that these seemingly very different concerns in fact all relate to a larger process whereby educational outcomes are increasingly homogenised, while the routes to those outcomes are increasingly differentiated. It is also further argued that in different ways, students try to disentangle these knots by seeking to develop disciplinary expertise and specialist skills, and by critiquing ideas of educational individualism and consumerism.
Policies to support unpaid carers
Authors: Lloyd Liz
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides an account of the key policies and strategies to support unpaid carers since the 1990s throughout the UK. It identifies similarities and differences in approaches of governments in the four constituent countries, discussing the aims and outcomes of these. Key themes arising from policies are identified, providing a basis for the discussions in Chapters 4 and 5. These themes include the role of policies in shaping recognition of carers; the focus on support for carers in their own right; a shift in the balance of responsibility for care and support between the state and unpaid carers; the personalisation agenda in social care and its impact on unpaid carers; and the changing roles of carers in the policy process and service planning.
Policies into practice
Authors: Lloyd Liz
Published: January 2024

Professional practices and the implications of policies for service provision are the focus of this chapter. Continuities and changes in professional perceptions of carers are discussed as well as key changes in the policy framework of practice. These changes include carers’ rights to assessment and support. In this discussion a more detailed view of the gap between the rhetoric of policies and the reality of practice is identified. Key elements of this concern the tensions that have arisen between the rights of carers and disabled people in the personalisation agenda as well as the organisational changes and diminished resources in local authorities. The changing role of carers’ organisations as participants in the development local services and as service providers is critically analysed.
Analysis of policies in context
Authors: Lloyd Liz
Published: January 2024

In this chapter, the analysis of policies and practices on unpaid care is developed with reference to theories of the policy process. The economic and political contexts of policies on unpaid care since the 1990s, particularly the impacts of austerity and the reduction in the role of statutory authorities, are discussed. A key question addressed is why, when policies have introduced new rights for carers, resources have been so consistently inadequate to make these a reality. The chapter considers the framing of unpaid care as a policy issue. It is argued that wider economic and political agendas should be understood not as impediments to but as core elements of policies on unpaid care. Local policy networks, including carers’ organisations, are discussed with reference to the concept of governance.
The political and ethical dimensions of care
Authors: Lloyd Liz
Published: January 2024

The discussion broadens in this chapter to reflect on the ethical and philosophical issues raised in previous chapters. It discusses the tension between perceptions of unpaid care as a widespread activity and of carers as a distinctive group. It provides a critical analysis of the ethic of care approach, including by disability theorists, and considers the potential for an ethic of justice in care relationships. A discussion of the care deficit draws attention to the impacts of neoliberal policies on care provision and on individuals’ experiences of dependency through the life course. Potential alternative approaches to policies are suggested, which draw upon the feminist ethics of care, recent theorising on risk and precarity in critical gerontology, and on ideas about care as a social risk in social policy theory.
Fiscal and social policy: two sides of the same coin
Authors: Pond Chris
Published: January 2024

Tax and welfare are both aspects of fiscal policy, yet a failure to treat them as such has hindered attempts to promote either economic prosperity or fairness. Over the decades, governments have experimented with integrating the two systems – negative income tax on the Right and more progressive forms of tax credit on the Left – but neither has made a significant impact on overall inequality. Campaigns for radical schemes such as Basic Income have again been generating both enthusiasm and criticism in recent years. Has the public appetite for such schemes changed as a result of the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and, very lately, the emergence of a more right-wing turn by the latest Conservative governments? The chapter concludes with a call for greater transparency, analysis and public debate.
Pensions and taxation
Authors: Collins Micheál L. , Lymer Andy
Published: January 2024

Pensions and pensions policy represent one of the major areas where taxation and social policy interact. Decisions impact on the current and future living standards of most individuals, involve substantial and growing state expenditure, raise questions of equity and efficiency, and grapple with the issue of the long-term sustainability of current approaches given demographic trends. This chapter examines the linkages between pensions and the taxation system in the UK and traces their evolution over time. Alongside an overview of the current UK pension system, and a review of the socio-economic policy context within which pensions policy is formed, it focuses on the current suite of tax-based incentives for occupational and personal pension savings and highlights the very significant tax-advantaged position provided for this form of long-term savings. The chapter concludes with a series of key issues that are likely to arise in the pensions–taxation policy space in the years ahead.
Taxation and local taxes
Authors: Orton Michael
Published: January 2024

Local taxation was the cause of the downfall of a politician of the stature of Margaret Thatcher, and for individuals and households it has a double impact, directly affecting disposable incomes and the availability of local services. Understanding local taxation requires consideration of technical details like council tax bands, ratios and regressivity, plus the obscure system of business rates reliefs. Such issues may seem a million miles away from a family’s ability to make ends meet, excessive wealth accumulation, a closed library or neglected child: but the opposite is the case. This chapter examines key issues relating to local taxation in Britain including council tax as a tax instrument, its regressive impact, increasing divergence within Britain, business rates and options for reform. Local tax in Britain illustrates both the need and the opportunity for greater examination of the impact of taxation on social, political and economic life.
Learning from the past to shape the future: uncovering social work’s histories of complicity and resistance
Authors: Ioakimidis Vasilios , Wyllie Aaron
Published: January 2024

Uncovering the complex political history of social work requires more than archival research, historical analyses and engagement with international scholarship. At a time when forms of collective soul-searching have resulted in the very future of social work being openly debated, the editors felt a sense of immediacy in approaching their task. Despite the fact that this book uncovers and interrogates aspects of social work’s past that are disturbing, it should be stressed that the starting premise is that social work is a ‘profession worth fighting for’. Social work is a contested activity. However, it occupies a critical space between state policies and some of the most vulnerable people in our societies. It is exactly such proximity with people affected by inequality and poverty that has led social workers to witness horrendous state brutality. Many social workers, over the years and across all continents, have challenged violence and oppression and sought to radically transform the profession through their engagement with broader social movements. In their 2004 manifesto that provided the basis for the formation of the Social Work Action Network, ‘Social Work and Social Justice’, Jones and colleagues have suggested that, more than any other welfare state profession, social work seeks to understand the links between ‘public issues’ and ‘private troubles’ and seeks to address both.
Colonial and apartheid South Africa: social work complicity and resistance
Authors: Harms-Smith Linda , Turton Yasmin
Published: January 2024

South African social work has its historical roots in not only violent and racist coloniality but also in its brutal continuity – that of repressive apartheid. Despite social work being defined as a social justice profession, its historiography points to a range of ideological positions in discourse, knowledge and practice. These positions mean variations in levels of complicity, sense of responsibility and resistance to matters of injustice, oppression and crimes against humanity. Colonisation of South Africa by the British and Dutch achieved gains for race-based mercantile capitalism through the violent enslavement of local people and the ‘importation’ of thousands. This creation of a Black, servile working class served the interests of White capital during the 19th century, forming the basis for apartheid’s legislated racism and inequality which would come to structure South African society. South African social work, developing from this context of growing inequality and social problems, developed in the early 20th century. Given the class- and race-based structuring of society through colonisation, its early roots and formalisation focused only on the White group. Various moments, and conjunctures before and during the period of apartheid as a crime against humanity emerge. These, among many, seem important for investigating the meanings and actions of complicity, responsibility and resistance, and so this chapter details some of these important antecedents and conjunctures. This task is difficult because textual (and other) discourses occupy the broadest range of ideological positions.
Trade union mobilisation, resistance and political action of social workers in Portugal
Authors: Silva Pedro Gabriel , Martins Alcina
Published: January 2024

In Portugal, the institutionalisation of social work took place in the 1930s under the veil of the Estado Novo (New State), a right-wing conservative dictatorship. Social workers were expected to act within the ideological and political tracks of the authoritarian regime. They were thus instrumental to the dictatorship’s authority and, as such, served the regime’s moral order while acting as agents of social conformity and control. However, from the 1960s onwards, signs of rupture began to be noticed, corresponding to an increasing involvement of social work professionals, students and educators in political movements, often engaging in oppositional, resistance and subversive activities against the regime. The profession, framed in the context of a fascist-prone corporativist state, was deemed to serve its purposes and was collectively represented, from the 1950s, by a single professional trade union. The leadership of the union was, as in many other corporativist organisations, occupied by high-profile senior social workers trusted by the regime. This continued until 1970, when younger social workers pulled the union away from the Estado Novo’s political power. This chapter focuses on this process of renovation, steered from inside the profession in direct connection with the social and political mobilisations against the dictatorship that were happening outside the ranks of social work. The changes observed in the Portuguese social workers’ trade union at this time show a process of renovation taking place in the profession during a period when collective action and civil liberties were severely limited and violently repressed.
Reversing democratic decline through political education
Authors: Print Murray
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the evidence collected in Australia, the US and Europe, and sets out what can be done in schools to help reverse democratic decline. It points to the importance of developing a formal school curriculum by an expert, non-partisan group to structure learning about citizenship, democracy and participation, as there is clear evidence that as students acquire more political knowledge, they develop more engaged political attitudes and activities. Attention is also drawn to the informal curriculum, which may consist of instrumental elements, such as student councils, student elections, student assemblies and student newspapers, and expressive elements, such as clubs, sports, bands and social activities, that can affect student political and civic learning. Finally, there is the role of situated learning where support for open and respectful classroom discussion has been widely found to facilitate understanding of disputed public issues, appreciation of political conflict, and readiness to engage in politics on an informed basis.
War and peace
Authors: Taylor Sebastian
Published: January 2024

In the 20th century, the notion of ‘security’ has expanded from military defence of the nation to incorporate social protection of the vulnerable. Over the last two decades, however, an emerging concept of ‘health security’ has struggled to define a dominant strategy – between enforcement of disease control (focused on high-risk epidemic diseases) and building social resilience through community cohesion. Using the example of HIV/AIDS, the chapter argues that our prevailing concept of health security emphasised protection of mainstream society from a disease associated with marginal communities. It concludes that, while eventually effective in controlling the epidemic, AIDS securitisation was achieved without adequately engaging with or resolving drivers of marginalisation among those groups most at risk and most heavily impacted.
The risk society
Authors: Taylor Sebastian
Published: January 2024

The hard model of health security – enhancing surveillance, public control and enforcement measures, and development of preventive and therapeutic technologies – can be extremely effective in controlling disease outbreaks in the short term. But it does not generate sustainable societal resilience to future risk. Drawing on the examples of HIV/AIDS, Ebolavirus, Zikavirus and COVID-19, the chapter argues that dominant ‘global health security’ strategies over-invest in hard technological control measures and underestimate the need to foster social, economic and cultural engagement in making those measures acceptable, workable and equitably effective within and through affected communities.
Who counts?
Authors: Taylor Sebastian
Published: January 2024

Truth is the fundamental medium holding societies together and making coherent human interaction possible – the basis of cohesive community and the currency of trust between people and government. Yet truth is elusive, continuously evolving as our systems of knowledge and value evolve. Building on Enlightenment advances in anatomy and surgery, health and medicine engendered a powerful classificatory framework supporting the development of dominant empirical methods in knowledge formation. At the global level, increasingly sophisticated post-war health metrics and big-data computational power have enabled the construction of an unprecedented architecture of information about the physical world of human health. But it is an architecture which sits on top of, rather than growing out of, the multiple realities of lives and deaths on the ground. In order to optimise our engagement with truth, we need reground our idea of knowledge in the messy realities through which it evolves, and to strengthen the role of actors on the ground in defining the empirical nature of the world they inhabit and the strategies, in health and wider social development, through which that world can be improved.
The unfortunate legacies of the 18th and 19th centuries
Authors: Gill Flora
Published: January 2024

The free market concepts that permeate standard economics textbooks and classrooms are an anachronistic legacy of Britain’s progressive 18th century battle for a more even distribution of economic power. The monopolistic power exercised by the monarchy during this period made the call for free markets a radical reform steeped in democratic principles. While this historic battle was progressive, nowadays advocates for unfettered free market systems have the opposite goal – steadily increasing the scale of wealth and income inequality globally, with dire consequences for the working population. These consequences are explored in more detail in Chapter 7.
Paid work through the lens of economics
Authors: Gill Flora
Published: January 2024

Economics renders the non-monetary aspects of paid work invisible, conceptually reducing employment to a trade-off between leisure time and financial gain. The standard textbook ignores many of the other benefits of paid work, such as links between employment and positive mental health. Likewise, it does not consider any of the negative aspects of paid work, such as unhealthy/unsafe working conditions or the inherent asymmetry of bargaining power. While progressive economists have drawn attention to significant levels of discrimination within the labour market, along with other systemic patterns that entrench low pay, the intellectual perspective of economics must be expanded to recognise the even richer role that work plays in people’s lives. This can be achieved by drawing on scholarly literature from a range of academic disciplines that focus on the non-monetary aspects of paid work.
Looking at paid work outside the lens of economics
Authors: Gill Flora
Published: January 2024

Psychologists, medical scientists and other researchers have stressed the positive contribution paid work makes to our emotional and physical wellbeing. This proposition is underscored by studies that find a high correlation between unemployment and the deterioration of physical and mental health, regardless of the availability of financial assistance or welfare. The literature also examines negative factors that undermine the health of employees, particularly the steep hierarchical structure that governs most workplaces. As the medical scholar Sir Michael Marmot highlighted, employees at the lower ends of these hierarchical structures demonstrate much higher levels of stress and, consequently, a higher incidence of cardiovascular diseases and other stress-related illnesses.
Intersections of Class and Gender in the Making of ‘Top Boys’ in the Finance Sector
Authors: Ingram Nicola , Bathmaker Ann-Marie , Abrahams Jessie , Bentley Laura , Bradley Harriet , Hoare Tony , Papafilippou Vanda , Waller Richard , Friedman Sam
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers the intersection of class and gender in the making of ‘top boys’, focusing on the finance sector. The chapter highlights key class-based differences in the way in which aspirations for success play out, based on the narratives of three young men from different social class locations. Comparing these narratives highlights the making of contemporary masculinities through a ‘top boys’ discourse that promotes competition, risk taking and the valorization of financial reward. The chapter highlights the ways in which forms of masculinity are promoted within the industry, as well as how the cultures and practices of a particular sector work to facilitate middle-class privilege. We make the case for ‘top boys’ as a new 21st-century form of hegemonic masculinity, where the discourse directs young men towards engaging in a symbolic struggle for masculine domination through aspiration to excel across multiple levels of success and to compete with the ‘top girls’ who have been gaining a foothold on the labour market through similar but feminized processes of ‘having it all’.
Lucky Breaks? Unplanned Graduate Pathways and Fateful Outcomes
Authors: Ingram Nicola , Bathmaker Ann-Marie , Abrahams Jessie , Bentley Laura , Bradley Harriet , Hoare Tony , Papafilippou Vanda , Waller Richard , Friedman Sam
Published: January 2024

This chapter uses the lens of ‘luck’ to consider how young adults in our study understand their opportunities, obstacles, successes and failures. We analyse perceptions of luck and bad luck as explanations for apparent non-decision making or lack of strategic planning. Each of the graduates discussed in this chapter left university without a plan for what they wanted to do in terms of a career. The chapter traces the ways in which their lives subsequently unfold and uses the notion of social magic to show how the embodied advantages of the privileged are misrecognized as competence and ‘fit’, and facilitate smoother employment transitions, even without a strategic plan.
Thinking the Molecular
Authors: Spatz Ben
Published: January 2024

This chapter contests the assumed primacy of technoscientific and biochemical methods in determining what human and other bodies are made of. From a perspective grounded in critical race, cultural, and performance studies, as well as embodied artistic research, it offers an expanded molecular theory of identity that foregrounds the radical asymmetry of what are still too often glossed as sociocultural signs or attributes rather than material substances. The chapter begins by surveying a handful of recent critical treatments of technoscientific molecules that foreground their racial and gendered construction. It then considers the politics implied by a more expansive conception of the molecular, comparing and contrasting this with theories of the molecular that follow Deleuze and Guattari. The final section reflects on the implications of such a conceptual shift for experimental research methods, including not only a richer way to theorize embodied difference but also a radical reshuffling of the dominant disciplinary hierarchies that attach greater epistemic primacy to more quantitative methods.
Gender on the Post-Colony: Phenomenology, Race, and the Body in Nervous Conditions
Authors: Rajan-Rankin Sweta , Greedharry Mrinalini
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the ways in which racialized bodies are re-presented [[AU: Do you mean “re-presented” or “represented” here]] through a phenomenological analysis of Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions. In order to situate the body within gendered and racialized narratives, the authors consider three key assertions. First, gender is itself a colonial construct, and postcolonial accounts of Blackness have often been elided in feminist narratives. Second, drawing on Mbembe's concept of “necropolitics” and Fanon's thesis on the impossibility of Black becoming, it can be said that the “body” itself becomes a key site for analyzing racialized bodies, highlighting the uneasy hierarchies of race and gender in this regard. And third, in order to move beyond exceptionalist framings of Blackness–whiteness as binaries, keen attention must be paid to the literary offerings of women of color. Nervous Conditions provides a powerful foil to explore these assumptions through the narratives of two young African girls and their ambivalent relationship with Blackness and modernity. The body serves as the final frontier on which the necropolitics of the post-colony are played out in struggle. The intermingling of race, gender, memory, and presence bring together a fresh gaze by which the phenomenological understanding of the racialized body can be uncovered.
Black Girls’ Bodies and Belonging in the Classroom
Authors: Miles Brittney
Published: January 2024

Through critical examination of mis/interpretations of Black girls’ bodies in school settings, this chapter interrogates readings and performances of Black talk, Black sass, and Black volume. A symbolic interactionist approach to interpreting meanings of Black girls’ bodies allows us to contextualize the subsequent corporeal and material negotiations they make as they navigate misogynoir and controlling images. There are perpetual inconsistencies between meanings about Black girls’ bodies that are ascribed to them and those that are self-defined by them. While Black girls are socialized into meanings about their bodies defined by others (these include negative stereotypes such as the “sapphire” that attempt to define and control what it means to be a “loud” as opposed to “quiet” Black girl), they use embodied reverse discourse and other body projects to craft alternative meanings that complicate such tropes. Ontologies of Black-girl being call us to consider how—through body projects, dress code responses, and sonic performances—Black girls pursue presence and autonomy. Their efforts challenge us to more deeply and comprehensively make space for them in educational spaces where they are on the margins.
Embodied Vulnerability and Sensemaking with Solidarity Activists
Authors: Russo Chandra
Published: January 2024

Though embodied resistance has figured centrally throughout history, social movement scholars have paid scant attention to the role of the body in activism. The few yet important studies on embodied activism tend to highlight the work of intentional bodily performance with less attention paid to how bodily experience shapes activists and the movements they join. Yet scholars have long argued that social movements should be understood as knowledge projects, bearing and disseminating alternative and often resistant worldviews. Through ethnographic study with solidarity activists that resist the US security state, I find that embodied experience is central to cultivating new and resistant forms of knowledge. This chapter seeks to center embodied experience as a key interpretive lens for both social movement participants and scholars, considering the layered ways in which studying the embodiment of solidarity activism is itself an embodied, interpretive project.
Local Views Regarding International Actors
Authors: Londoño Catalina Montoya
Published: January 2024

Chapter 5 focuses on views held locally in Colombia regarding the countries and international organizations whose peacebuilding cooperation is studied in this work. It describes local key stakeholders in Colombia, including FARC, expert commentators and academics writing for the magazine Razón Pública and local NGOs working on human rights, development and peacebuilding, including Somos Defensores, Dejusticia, CINEP/PPP and Indepaz. The chapter assesses how these local actors publicly supported, differed from, or questioned the role of international actors in peacebuilding, and whether they maintained an engagement with peacebuilding or resorted to a more confrontational approach to the resolution of the armed conflict. Such local views are explored to appreciate key features about the national debate on international efforts.
Conclusion: Assessing the Impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the Future of War and the State
Authors: Chin Warren
Published: January 2024

The principal focus of this chapter is on the question of what impact the fourth industrial revolution will have on the conduct of war in the future. Sub-questions focus on how wider changes within society precipitated by this revolution will feed into the change process militaries are currently embarking on. The most important question here is the extent to which wider political change, which has its foundation in this latest revolution, challenges current conceptions of Western military thought. In adopting a wider vista, it is possible to situate current military thinking in a wider technological context and this will allow us to better understand how war and the state will be affected by the fourth industrial revolution as it progresses towards maturity.
Global Rankings of Good Governance and Higher Education
Authors: Erkkilä Tero , Chou Meng-Hsuan , Kauppi Niilo
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the development of global rankings in good governance and higher education. Initially, the metrics dealt with good governance and competitiveness of countries, but since the 2000s the global rankings on higher education and innovation have emerged. Recently, city rankings have highlighted the importance of assessment of academic research and education. The effects of these rankings have been numerous, and innovation, higher education and academic life more generally have been increasingly governed by high-pace data-driven reforms, as for example our discussion on the case of Paris-Saclay University demonstrates.
Human Capital and the Rise of the Global Talent Competition
Authors: Erkkilä Tero , Chou Meng-Hsuan , Kauppi Niilo
Published: January 2024

In this chapter, we discuss innovation rankings and city-level measurements of competitiveness that draw heavily from other indicators, hence echoing the hegemonic views and ideological undercurrents already present in the ranking field. The sharing of data is part of the evolving conventional power of data production on a global level. Empirically, we focus on four key indicators of knowledge governance and competitiveness that also reveal how the global ranking field has evolved: Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), Global Innovation Index (GII), Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI) and Global Power City Index (GPCI). We analyse the convergence of the metrics of competitiveness, innovation and education and its implications on the policy script of ‘talent competition’. We conclude the chapter with closer analysis of the actors behind the GTCI.
From the Medieval Scholar to the Global Flows of Academics: Exploring the Emergence, Evolution and Impact of the ‘Talent’ Imaginary
Authors: Erkkilä Tero , Chou Meng-Hsuan , Kauppi Niilo
Published: January 2024

In this chapter, we examine the knowledge alchemy involved in transforming academic mobility as a familiar act of academic travel to a commodified activity in today’s global competition for talent. In contemporary policy making, the assumed practices of the medieval scholar often inform the common image of an academic today. A visual that emerges is one of free flow of knowledge even though the actual practices of scholarly mobility – especially in medieval times – are hardly without incident. So why is this image so enduring and how does it affect our contemporary debates concerning the global competition for talent? For policy makers at multiple governance levels – university, national, regional and international – this image is ever present because a mobile scholar generates seemingly untold benefits, not least in scientific terms, and, more recently, economic competitiveness gains and cultural diversity.
Conclusion
Authors: Erkkilä Tero , Chou Meng-Hsuan , Kauppi Niilo
Published: January 2024

In our conclusions, we discuss how knowledge alchemy is embedded in transnational administration and global policy making through numerical tools, imaginaries and narratives used across multiple policy domains and sectors. To further understand conventional power in contemporary national and transnational governance, this book has uncovered the mechanism that maintain and reinforce a generic process of knowledge alchemy, as well as its limitations. Global knowledge governance is increasingly travelling on digital train tracks, where its direction is set by the existing data and metrics shared by the indicator producers. These digital train tracks seem rather resistant to disruptions and alternative worldviews. We argue that the critical examination of global models and scripts and their changing nature also allows critical reflection over them, marking an opening for agency.
The Municipalisation of the European Political Space
Authors: Mocca Elisabetta
Published: January 2024

The EC/EU has been an eminently nation-led project. However, running in parallel, the European municipalist movement, weaving relations among cities across Europe, has sought to carve out an influential political role for municipalities within the European polity. The study of European municipal cooperation has become a consolidated thread of research in European and urban studies. Nonetheless, contributions on the topic tend to focus on the pragmatic aspects of municipal collaborations, glossing over the ideological foundations of European municipalism. Therefore, by challenging the dominant scholarly view, this chapter contends that European municipalism may be considered as a ‘thin-centred’ ideology. Drawing on Freeden’s (1996, 1998, 2017) work, the ideological structure of European municipalism is unbundled by throwing light on its conceptual components. As a result, this chapter construes European municipalism as a fully-fledged political ideology, which postulates universal city-to-city mutualism and proposes a European counter-project built on a polycentric and diffuse conception of power.
Terrorism and Hate Crime: From the Long Fuse to Hate Speech
Authors: David Matthew
Published: January 2024

In an information society, can jaw-jaw really be a form of war-war? Certainly, the ground has been sown for a clash of liberties: when the right of expression confronts the right to security. This chapter applies David Wall’s transformation test to the themes of so-called cyber terrorism and hate speech online. Has the digital made a difference? Clearly, digital networks can be used to distribute propaganda by those advocating politically motivated violence, and to spread hate speech; but do such affordances actually translate into the increased violence some seek to achieve? Digital networks can be used to trigger a bomb, but have not been used successfully to crash a plane or blow up a nuclear power station (as has been depicted in fiction). The internet can be used to recruit and plan violence, but such channels are not so anonymous and unregulated as might be imagined.
Bullying, Stalking and Trolling
Authors: David Matthew
Published: January 2024

The changing composition of stalkers and the new dynamics of interpersonal revelation, surveillance and interaction suggest that the digital really has made a difference. However, while stalking online shows different characteristics from that carried out in predominantly ‘real-world’ space and time, the most harmful forms of stalking and bullying retain many traditional characteristics, which trolling now replicates as well. Online interaction increases scope for being targeted, and expectations to reveal information about one’s actions, location and preferences creates opportunities for bullies, stalkers and trolls. Can we and should we seek to prohibit certain forms of display and surveillance, and does that mean protecting some people from themselves or blaming internet users for their own victimization? While particular spaces swarm with trolls, finding one’s tribe is easier online. While ‘mobile network youth’ experience new forms of harassment online, it is also increasingly possible to find communities of support and identification.
Fraud, Extortion and Identity Theft
Authors: David Matthew
Published: January 2024

Micro-fraud has increased vastly online. There has been a huge escalation of online fraud. In addition, more traditional forms of large-scale fraud are also made easier through digital channels to digitally held accounts. Overall levels of fraud are on the increase because overall levels of financial transaction have increased, and overall levels of online fraud reflect this. Scope to steal a person’s identity increases online precisely because online forms of identification are more ‘alienable’. The separation of identify and identification is intensified in online domains, even if the distinction between personality and persona has longer roots. While ‘identity theft’ is significantly escalated online, capacity to appropriate someone else’s identity has its limits. Encryption is never absolute, but in transactions where both parties have an interest in maintaining confidentiality, digital keys are more secure than physical ones. Where sharing keys with non-trusted others takes place, digital encryption falls apart.
Sharing Software, Music and Visual Content
Authors: David Matthew
Published: January 2024

Intellectual property (IP) became more significant in recent years, as has its challenge. Does it make any sense to legislate against copying machines rather than their users? The very notion of intellectual property is built upon the idea that creativity resides in objects rather than in action. However, online sharing undermines property rights, increasing rewards to creative actors when people stop paying for recordings and consequently pay more for live events. Downloading films and, in particular, the free livestreaming of sporting events are said to undermine commercial sponsorship of visual culture. Yet, the most directly digital of all content producers, the software industries, have adapted best. Adaptation to the digital affordances of access, evasion (by distributed networking), concealment or transparency (encryption/revelation) and incitement (by free global promotion/publicity) is key.
The Right to Subsist: Transnational Commons Against the Enclosure of Environments and Environmentalism
Authors: Bresnihan Patrick , Millner Naomi
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on the consolidation of environmental governance narratives and management practices during the 1980s and 1990s – as well as the emergence of important counter-movements to protest these tendencies. We note during this period that social movements seeking to render perceptible concerns relating to resource extraction and harms relating to the industrialisation of the global food system choose to do so by names other than environmentalism. This focus also allows us to draw out the central concern with aesthetics in the book, which is to say, the ways that resonance is and is not created by social movements, collectives and the articulation of new iconographies.
Conclusion: Resonance Beyond Environmentalism
Authors: Bresnihan Patrick , Millner Naomi
Published: January 2024

In this chapter we revisit our arguments by drawing out our key ideas around aesthetics, specifically focusing on resonance and disagreement. These two concepts form the building blocks for an alternative way of cultivating change to the ‘environmentalist way of seeing’, whose limitations we lay out in a fresh way. This brings us to our coda, which is more of an afterword.
The Ballot of Donald and Hillary: Hateful Memories of Celebrity Leaders
Authors: Fine Gary Alan , Robertson Christopher , Abbo Cal
Published: January 2024

Why are some political leaders hated? Examining the public responses to the major party candidates in the 2016 Presidential election in the United States, we analyze the animus directed towards Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. We argue that candidates with celebrity reputations and who have been previously well-known are particularly likely to be targets of intense discursive abuse. Hatred becomes part of the identity of that part of the population that considers them as threats to democratic order. Partisans draw upon Trump’s persona from the 1980s as a vulgar celebrity whose real estate business was corrupt as well as his well-publicized questioning of Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Despite the fact – or perhaps because – Trump was once a liberal democrat, the rejection is visceral. Hatred for Hillary is transferred from the long-standing distaste for her husband, coupled with sexist sentiments directed at middle-aged women. Significantly, the dislike for both candidates during the election was sexualized, as was true for both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. We speculate that President Joe Biden, lacking a contentious backstory, will be spared some of the hatred that other politicians receive.
Contentious Pasts, Contentious Futures: Race, Memory, and Politics in Montgomery’s Legacy Museum
Authors: Sodaro Amy
Published: January 2024

With memory politics playing an increasingly central role in political and social life, there has been a shift in the American commemorative landscape towards sites that attempt to critically confront America’s history of racial violence, exemplified by The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, created by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum focuses on the most contentious and painful aspects of America’s past, which have usually only been touched upon as a prelude to the triumphalist narrative of the success of the Civil Rights Movement. Unlike other US memorial museums, The Legacy Museum confronts controversial aspects of the US’s past in very material and demanding ways, asking individuals to acknowledge their role in past and present racial injustice and placing white Americans in the position of what Michael Rothberg has called the “implicated subject.” This chapter analyses The Legacy Museum’s confrontation of America’s racist past in the context of the current social-political moment in the US and within the larger global commemorative trend of memorial museums as a form of reckoning with contentious pasts and futures.
The End of Labour? Rethinking the Labour Question in the Digital Age
Authors: Webster Edward , Dor Lynford
Published: January 2024

This framing chapter situates the book’s case studies within their historical context. Over the last half-century, globalisation and digitalisation have dramatically changed the world of work, and the social weight of the international labour movement has declined. Understanding these changes has preoccupied labour scholars. The chapter explores how this literature has wrestled with Karl Polanyi’s notion of a counter-movement to find new hope for labour under neo-liberalism. But the conundrum that is the ‘future of labour’ ultimately takes us back to Marx, whose insights into the inherent logics of capital accumulation and the fundamental contradictions of wage labour provide the theoretical building blocks for understanding the changing politics of production today. The central argument is that capital employs numerous ‘labour-process fixes’ to overcome impediments to accumulation, undermine worker organisation and restructure the workforce. The case studies in the rest of the book then consider how labour process changes in different industries ‘unmake, remake and make’ sections of the workforce and the working class more broadly. Finally, the chapter introduces the idea that how workers build power is the guiding question when enquiring what future there is for labour.
Divided Workers, Divided Struggles: Entrenching Dualisation and the Struggle for Equalisation in South Africa’s Manufacturing Sector
Authors: Dor Lynford
Published: January 2024

The manufacturing workplace has undergone significant changes in the post-apartheid era, from ongoing technological advancement to the rise of ‘non-standard’ or ‘precarious’ forms of employment and the decline of a dominant trade union presence. In almost any factory in South Africa today, a large proportion of workers are either employed by a subcontracted company (externalisation and labour broking) or are contracted directly but on a highly insecure basis (casualisation). Most of these workers are not unionised. In order to understand what the future of labour in the manufacturing sector might look like, it is crucial to understand how restructuring the labour process throws up both obstacles and possibilities for workers to build their power. We show that the dominant union response to restructuring has been to become complicit in entrenching dualised workplace regimes based on ‘hegemonic control’ over unionised permanent workers and ‘despotic’ forms of control over workers in precarious forms of employment. New challenges to capital’s dualised workplace regime are emerging from below, as precarious workers struggle for permanent jobs and equalisation to rebuild power for themselves at a workplace level.
Changing Sources of Power and the Future of Southern Labour
Authors: Webster Edward , Dor Lynford
Published: January 2024

The concluding chapter begins by returning to the early 1970s in South Africa. At that time, a resurgence of labour’s power seemed implausible. Today, the future for labour also looks uncertain. But the Durban strikes of 1973 show that one underestimates workers at one’s peril. With this basic lesson in mind, we reconsider the findings from each of the case studies to outline the trajectory that worker struggles have taken over recent decades. We see how labour process fixes and the rise of new branches of industry all contribute to a dynamic process that restructures the working class. It is capital’s efforts to overcome impediments to accumulation and find fresh avenues for accumulation that unmakes and remakes the working class in some cases and creates new sections of the class in others. This chapter ultimately considers how workers and their organisations respond in different historical and contextual moments by harnessing diverse sources of power to be unmade, remade and made anew. In the current moment of flux, we suggest that the revival of labour movements in the Global South is likely to come from workers who are experimenting with various forms of organisation and different sources of power.