bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Women’s Participation in Small Island Resilience Building in Concepcion, Iloilo, Philippines
Authors: Geges Dhino B.
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses how women’s participation through social enterprises became valuable in enhancing resilience in island communities of Concepcion, Iloilo. The concept of and proposals for building “community resilience” (CR) have gained increasing importance across the region. Unfortunately, this idea has not been fully explored and articulated. It raises questions such as “What kinds of entrepreneurial activities would be helpful?” and “How exactly can women’s participation in socio-economic interventions strengthen resilience?” A case study and mixed-methods approach were employed for this study. Findings indicate that women’s associations in island villages exist and are usually anchored under the Federation of KALIPI Women’s Association in Concepcion Iloilo Inc. (FKWACI), a municipality-wide umbrella organization for women. The role of women in spearheading the community-managed savings and credit association (CoMSCA) was seen as an effective way of sustaining social enterprises (SEs). Women’s disaster preparedness involvement can be accounted for in fulfilling their functions within the Barangay Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Committee (BDRRMC). Participation of women in various community-based engagements, especially in social enterprise management, exemplifies their reproductive, productive, and community roles. Elements such as gender equality, effective communication and leadership management, and market-driven approaches were identified as critical factors to sustain their livelihood activities.
Gender and Labor Market Regimes in Post-Disaster Haiyan Communities in Leyte
Authors: Bonifacio Glenda Tibe
Published: January 2024

As issues about climate change, global warming, and the environment have become part of discourse and policy around the world, the relations between gender and labor market regimes arising in post-disaster communities seem paramount. Gender is a recognized aspect of the differences between men and women in survival rates and impact on their economic and social well-being during and after the onset of disasters. Post-disaster communities are unique in their own ways of survival, resilience, and dynamics of intervenors in reconstruction efforts and development strategies. Governments, non-profit organizations, international aid agencies, and individual philanthropy work together or independently to rebuild economies. The interplay of these actors in creating labor market regimes in post-disaster communities affects local populations: for example, who benefits from it, who participates in it, and how they participate. This chapter explores the relations between gender and labor market regimes in post-disaster communities. After a natural disaster, the gendered composition of households changes due to death and or migration. The issue of who is left behind is crucial to the household’s participation in employment and the type of employment generated. Feminist analysis infused data from fieldwork in urban and rural areas.
Social Media in Recruitment, Hiring and Firing Decisions
Authors: Capuano Angelo
Published: January 2024

This chapter exposes how an employer’s use of social media creates risks of discrimination based on class and social background. This includes risks of ‘social origin’ discrimination in Australian and South African law, risks of ‘family status’ discrimination in Canadian and New Zealand law, and risks of discrimination based on other protected attributes. The chapter examines three practices: (1) cybervetting; (2) job advertisement targeting; and (3) terminating an employee’s employment for social media posts.
Making Future Workplaces Fairer and More Equitable
Authors: Capuano Angelo
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines policy options for employers which may make future workplaces fairer and more equitable. In particular, it considers how the use of CV de-identification or blind recruitment, bias training (with certain qualifications), targeted job advertisements and other strategies may help to enhance socio-economic diversity in workplaces. It also considers how these strategies can be used as alternatives to the existing use of certain recruitment algorithms and artificial intelligence by employers.
Police Violence, Anti-Police Protest Movements and the Challenge of Decolonialism
Authors: Cunneen Chris
Published: January 2024

In mid-2020, protest movements against police violence erupted around the world. Many of these were in solidarity with those protesting the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and took on references to the Black Lives Matter movement. The global demonstrations were sparked by the events in the United States, but they were also part of ongoing international protest movements. In Australia, First Nations-led protests against Aboriginal deaths in police and prison custody have been a feature of the political landscape for decades (Whittaker, 2020). In Latin America the extent of police violence meant that protests against police were common occurrences (Watson, 2020). This chapter considers the shared themes that have united these global outpourings of protest against the violence of police and security forces and places them within the broader historical and contemporary framework of (de)colonialism.
Crossing Red Lines: Exploring the Criminalization and Policing of Sedition and Dissent in Pakistan
Authors: Ali Jan Ammar , Waseem Zoha
Published: January 2024

Sedition laws were crucial for imperial control in the mid-19th and 20th centuries, criminalizing political dissent and nationalism in British colonies. A century-and-a-half later, the laws continue to be applied to discipline and deter government critics. In Pakistan, the application of the law of sedition has intensified in reaction to civil society protests and social movements challenging state violence and injustices against marginalized communities. Although sedition has been approached in critical historical, legal and political scholarship on South Asia, we unpack how the threat and application of this law continues to shape the lived experiences of civilians impacted and rendered insecure as the postcolonial state seeks to pacify resistance to its authority and discipline dissidents. We develop existing understandings of how criminalization serves as a weapon for postcolonial states, where regimes have remained inherently insecure and regime insecurity becomes a lens through which such criminalization of activism and dissent may be understood.
The Contemporary Criminalization of Activists: Insights from Latin America
Authors: Cavalcanti Roxana Pessoa , Celi Israel , Gomes Simone
Published: January 2024

The criminalization of activists and social movements poses concrete challenges to the exercise of democratic rights and the manifestation of demands for social justice. This chapter aims to engage with a number of research questions relating to the forms of contemporary criminalization of activists in Latin America. Utilizing findings from qualitative research in Mexico, Brazil and Ecuador, the chapter explores how legislation and the criminal justice system have been used to quash dissent and criminalize activists. In particular, stigmatizing discourses and terminology referring to criminals, terrorists and communists have been used to delegitimize activists and justify the repression of social movements and protests. Paradoxically, there has also been an expansion of the number and range of protagonists responding to and resisting political turmoil. This chapter draws lessons from these new developments to expand our understanding of the structural and historical relationships between the state and civil society in postcolonial contexts.
Framing Human Insecurity between Dispossession and Difference
Authors: Benzaquen Guilherme , Borba Pedro
Published: January 2024

This chapter develops a critical approach to the making of security and insecurity, employing insights from postcolonial and decolonial literature. Critical approaches have played a key role in expanding the frontiers of the concept of security through a critique of both methodological nationalism and nationalist methodology. However, by not detaching themselves from liberal reasoning such approaches end up endorsing a normative cosmopolitan individualism. In contrast, we explore the potential of the categories ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ to deepen a critical perspective in security studies. We suggest empires should not be analytically understood only by their formal political institutions, but also by the articulation they have historically produced between the colonial difference they establish and the accumulation by dispossession they enable. Colonial forms of expropriation have long constituted generative mechanisms of human insecurity, whose features are more distinguishable from a perspective of the global South.
Private Military Force in the Global South: Mozambique and Southern Africa
Authors: Lea John
Published: January 2024

Some states in the global South, debilitated by ‘structural adjustment’ and other policies imposed by the imperialist powers of the global North, face the presence on the national terrain of powerful non-state actors capable of neutralizing or effectively substituting for the state, particularly in areas related to security. These include, on the one hand, ISIS-connected insurgents seeking to substitute for the state and, on the other hand, powerful transnational corporations seeking to divert state resources to their own needs. As states grapple with the resulting conflicting governance demands recourse to private military and security or mercenaries has become a frequent policy option. This chapter uses recent (2021) events in Mozambique to illustrate the problems encountered by states deploying such private military force to fight insurgencies while managing the security demands of transnational corporations.
Where to ‘Keep’ the Queer: Contestations and Anxieties in Clinical Communications
Authors: Chatterjee Aritra
Published: January 2024

Given its inevitable influence in all stages of our lives, medical discourse is a significant form of public science communication and one that is especially relevant to queer people. Queerness has often been included within dominant discourses of pathology in public medical discourse and queer people have been at the active receiving end of this institutionalized oppression. Using examples from India, this chapter examines the framing of queerness within public psychological and HIV/AIDS discourse, demonstrating just how subjective and politically inflected this discourse is and how destructive it can be for queer people.
Introduction: Values, Participation and Mental Capacity Laws in International Comparative Perspective
Authors: Kong Camillia , Coggon John , Cooper Penny , Dunn Michael , Keene Alex Ruck
Published: January 2024

This chapter sets out the framework and rationale for Capacity, Participation and Values in Comparative Legal Perspective. We explore how core themes of values (that is, the values embedded within a legal framework and whose values are given effect) and participation (that is, whether and how the person’s voice and agency is fostered in decision making about them) establish a fruitful analytic prism through which to draw cross-jurisdictional comparisons of different mental capacity and guardianship legal regimes. Through a shared language with which to speak about capacity law we suggest that cross-jurisdictional learning and dialogue may be fostered.
Mental Capacity Law in England and Wales: A Value-Laden Jurisdiction
Authors: Stickler Rebecca
Published: January 2024

The Mental Capacity Act 2005 provides the statutory framework in England and Wales for making decisions about whether a person (‘P’) lacks capacity to make a decision and, if so, what decision should be made on their behalf. By virtue of the nature of decisions made, the governing legal framework and its application on the ground will never (and can) never be value neutral. This chapter explores the core values inherent within the Act’s architecture (for example, non-discrimination, maximising P’s individuality and autonomy, supporting P’s capacitous decision-making, ensuring P’s engagement and involvement in decision making and consultation and collaboration) and examines two fundamental overarching questions: (1) how values have been positively and negatively applied in practice by the Court of Protection and legal practitioners; and (2) what further steps need to be taken to improve ethical practices towards persons at the centre of decision making.
Navigating Values in Aotearoa New Zealand
Authors: Gledhill Kris
Published: January 2024

This chapter sets out briefly the constitutional framework in Aotearoa New Zealand and the growth from common law roots of a legal system which has begun to accommodate the values of Māori. As part of doing this, legislation increasingly makes express reference to values. The development of this from the main legislation relating to capacity, the Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988, through legislation in 1992 and 2003 relating to mental health and intellectual disability respectively, and to the Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act 2017, is traced. The 1988 statute has limited references to values, but there are implicit values, which are made more express in the 1992 and 2003 legislation, and are a significant feature of the 2017 legislation. What has grown in particular is the need to take account of cultural values, which may differ as between those from South Pacific families and those from a European background.
Compeerists of the World Unite!
Authors: Gerhardt Hannes
Published: January 2024

Chapter 9 turns to the political mobilization that would be called for to truly achieve a post-capitalist future along compeerist lines. The case is made that such a political-economic upheaval would depend on the emergence of an intentional, commoner consciousness that could inspire a mass political ‘movement of movements’. Yet for such movement to outcompete other, more destructive discourses and mobilizations that are likely to emerge as capitalism’s failings mount, will depend on being able to deliver actual benefits from the commons and commoning. Harnessing a mass mobilization to compeerist ends is thus presented as necessitating both bottom-up forms of exit and targeted ‘hit-and-run’ demands on the state. This latter focus on the state is based on a long-term commitment to improve the chances of localized, compeerist initiatives to form and coalesce to the point where they can effectively challenge capital.
Sexual Harassment and Claiming the Right to Everyday Life
Authors: Boyer Kate
Published: January 2024

Rights to space has been a foundational issue in Feminist Geography from its earliest days. To paraphrase Gill Valentine’s keystone work in this area, the tendency for women and other feminized subjects to limit their use of space due to fear of gender violence can be understood as a spatial expression of hetero-patriarchy. This chapter critically reviews key trends in scholarship on sexual harassment in public and activist efforts to combat it. It focuses on the spatial contexts of the street, the night-time economy and higher education institutions. A fundamental question of spatial justice, I argue that sexual harassment can be approached through three conceptual lenses: the relational emergence of bodies; the politics of everyday spatial practice; and the ways affects and the atmospheres they generate shape spatial experience. I argue that geographers have a vital role to play in advancing knowledge on this issue, and conclude by outlining a research agenda tracing outlines along which this work might unfold.
Data Boundaries Are Drawn Within Historical Norms
Authors: Lawson B.T.
Published: January 2024

The shape and scope of data bounds are not just determined by quantitative realism, policy, identity construction or the data itself. Data bounds emerge into – and so are shaped by – historical norms. This chapter examines how this occurred through the projection of ‘90,000 cases per day’ by 19 July 2021 by Christina Pagel. This projection failed to ‘take off’ like other figures during the pandemic. While some would point to its simplicity (and the way it ultimately proved to be wide of the mark), this chapter argues that it did not circulate because of the way inequality had been normalized in the UK. This historical context meant that Trade-Off did not factor inequality into the equation of risk – the effect on the most deprived in society was considered acceptable collateral for the freedoms of those less deprived. This was the reason that Pagel’s projection was ignored: 90,000 cases offered very little threat to certain groups in society and a considerable threat to others. Such a case study emphasizes the need to understand and interrogate the contingencies into which data bounds emerge.
How Does UCP Protect Without Weapons?
Authors: Wallace M.S.
Published: January 2024

Given ‘common-sense’ wisdom that violence is required to stop violence, any serious investigation into unarmed civilian protection (UCP) must first critically examine widespread beliefs about the protective value of violence and then identify the mechanisms by which nonviolence, in the form of UCP, is capable of preventing violence and protecting civilians. This chapter first reveals how collective armed security-seeking practices are unreliable and often generate insecurity for those they are meant to protect. Second, I argue that UCP is able to prevent and protect people from violence via four primary mechanisms, most succinctly expressed as UCP as deterrent, mirror, bridge, and support. Ultimately, although neither violent nor nonviolent responses can guarantee protection from violence, the unarmed, nonviolent status of UCP actors facilitates, rather than hinders, these protective mechanisms – while armed approaches to protection can actually weaken them.
Gender and Care in Unarmed Civilian Protection
Authors: Oakley Derek
Published: January 2024

This chapter offers a new framing of how individuals and groups learn and practice unarmed civilian protection (UCP), in relation to feminism, gender, cultural identity and other subjectivities, exploring the ambiguous relationship of UCP to the wider field of humanitarian work and the ‘development–security nexus’ within the context of contemporary gendered and racialized capitalism. The article argues that care work not only supports and enables knowledge creation and sharing, but is itself a form of social reproduction that sustains and ‘makes’ UCP and thus the differential distribution of the burden of care and knowledge creation in UCP teams demands further attention. Furthermore; greater attention to the intersectionality of identities within the UCP community is essential to future scholarship and action around this practice; especially the importance of the eldership of older, more experienced men and women from the Global South, and the embodied knowledge that these elders recognize, carry and share with peers.
Reproducing the Canon, Reproducing Inequity (Traditional Rhetoric)
Authors: Berenguer Elizabeth , Jewel Lucy , McMurtry-Chubb Teri A.
Published: January 2024

This chapter invites readers to identify the specific ways traditional legal rhetoric does harm to the cause of social justice and equity. In this way, this chapter operates as a critical casebook, presenting several appellate opinions for readers to deeply read and digest. Rather than tell the reader how traditional legal rhetoric harms, the objective is for readers to see this for themselves. These are not especially well-known cases; they are relatively run-of-the-mill cases, representing a wide spectrum of doctrines, including immigration law, privacy law, entertainment law, obscenity law, qualified immunity / excessive force, and freedom of religion / First Amendment. Each case, however, negatively impacts justice and equity for a member of a minoritized or marginalized community. After each case, the reader will confront discussion questions that surface the social and historical context involved in the case, the role of the judge, and other ways that traditional rhetorical frameworks influenced the legal outcome in the case.
Decolonizing the University: A Perspective from Bristol
Authors: Birdi Alvin
Published: January 2024

Universities have a responsibility in reproducing and validating knowledge and culture across generations. Movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Why is My Curriculum White? have led many universities to focus on decolonization to exercise this responsibility in socially just ways. Despite considerable critical literature on decolonization, there are few examples of what is entailed in decolonizing a university. This chapter uses examples from a UK university to identify practical steps that universities can take to reorient their recruitment, estates, curricula and pedagogies in ways that empower students to critically engage with the provenance, applicability and relevance of teaching. The chapter also reflects on the limitations and risks of trying to decolonize entirely from within, and the importance of building alliances with local and global communities. It also considers the importance of a ‘whole institution’ approach and points to decolonization as an embedded process of curriculum development rather than an end state.
Decolonizing the Curriculum in English Secondary Schools: Lessons from Teacher-led Initiatives in Bristol
Authors: Glowach Terra , Hicks-Beresford Tanisha , Mitchell Rafael
Published: January 2024

In 2017, the Runnymede Trust released an influential study on racial disparities in Bristol schools, shocking many educators in the city. In accounting for the below-national-average attainment of young Black learners, the report highlighted ‘the unrepresentativeness of the curriculum, lack of diversity in teaching staff and school leadership, and poor engagement with parents.’ This chapter provides an account of two initiatives that have sought to respond to the report – a citywide project called the One Bristol Curriculum and the collaborative efforts of teachers within a multi-academy trust. In drawing together learnings from these initiatives, the chapter (tentatively) identifies some common school-level factors that support efforts to decolonize the curriculum in Bristol schools, the need for knowledge and expertise beyond the teaching profession, mobilizing capacities within professional learning networks, and, given the unconducive policy environment, the need for teacher agency and leadership as a basis for curriculum development.
Decolonizing Citational and Quotational Practices as Reparative Politics
Authors: Priyadharshini Esther
Published: January 2024

How do we predominantly understand and practise citation and quotation in academia? What alternative practices are already in evidence, and may be usefully theorized for greater diversity in the sources and types of knowledge we valorize? This chapter considers these questions as a way of addressing the epistemic-material violence of knowledge-generating systems still inflected with colonial and patriarchal values. After setting out how epistemological and material reparations are intimately entangled, the chapter posits that paying critical attention to the politics of citation and quotation may be necessary to re-craft strategies for more sustainable futures. By focusing on the problematic of quoting Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing-living that involve intimate, sometimes wordless, conversations with human-plant-animal-material elements, the chapter explores how moving beyond the conventional reliance on human language to paying attention to indexical and iconic semiotics may benefit from a careful use of multimodal media. It concludes with a plea for greater experimentation with citational, quotational and publishing practices.
The Battle for Britain
Authors: Clarke John
Published: January 2024

This book addresses the social, political and economic turbulence in which the UK is embroiled. Drawing on approaches from Cultural Studies, it explores proliferating crises and conflicts, from the multiplying varieties of social dissent through the stagnation of rentier capitalism to the looming climate catastrophe. Examining arguments about Brexit, class and ‘race’, and the changing character of the state, the book is underpinned by a transnational and relational conception of the UK, ranging from the legacies of Empire to the turbulent relationships with Europe. It traces the entangled dynamics of time and space that have shaped the current conjuncture. In the process it gives particular attention to the rise of nationalist populism and its implications for an increasingly disunited Kingdom. It gives particular attention to the political-cultural work of articulation that underpins the assembling of political blocs – rather than assuming that Britain is divided by identity politics. It focuses on the stresses and strains in the current bloc. Questioning whether increasingly anti-democratic and authoritarian strategies can provide a resolution to these troubles, it examines how the accumulating crises and conflicts have produced a deepening ‘crisis of authority’ that forms the terrain of the Battle for Britain.
Turbulent Times: The Making of the Present
Authors: Clarke John
Published: January 2024

Just as the place of the conjuncture is complicated, so is the challenge of telling its time. Conjunctures are formed in the intersection of different temporalities and are shaped by their different rhythms. The chapter begins and ends with the longue durée of the environmental catastrophe – and its rapidly quickening pace. The chapter also argues for attention to the long and unfinished trajectory of the post-colonial and its interweaving with the profoundly contested field of the social. Here differences, divisions and inequalities of different sorts have been de-naturalised and made politically contestable – and resisted by ‘restorationist’ strategies. A quicker rhythm is evident in the temporality of the successive transformations of the British economy from failed Fordism to failed neoliberalisation and into the stagnations of rentier capitalism. Finally, political time is marked by the shifting attempts to manage these fields, their intersections and their accumulating crises, in which Brexit forms a distinctive rupture. Political time, however, also involves the articulation of nostalgias of different kinds, from Empire to Fordist relations of work and welfare.
Thinking Relationally: Class and Its Others
Authors: Clarke John
Published: January 2024

The moment of Brexit heralded a renewed interest in the working class as an oppositional force. This chapter argues that there are both empirical and conceptual problems at stake in this rediscovery of the working class. Empirically, it neglects the powerful role played by sections of the middle classes (the ‘suburbs and shires’) in bringing Brexit about. Conceptually, it raises difficult questions about how to think of a working class in deindustrialised, decollectivised and desocialised settings. More importantly, perhaps, the pursuit of this working class has too readily imagined it as a white working class (in the UK and elsewhere, notably the US). The chapter asks when the working class became ‘white’ and how this identity became politically mobilised. The chapter concludes with an argument for a more expansively relational understanding of social forces – as complexly classed, raced, gendered and embodied – as a precondition for thinking about the dynamics of political mobilisation and demobilisation.
Information Warfare in Technocratic Times
Authors: Ellis Justin R.
Published: January 2024

This chapter presents the context and consequences of representational harms facing LGBTQ individuals and communities through the old and newer digital media logics of the hybrid media ecosystem. The chapter lays out the argument of the book and the evidence to support it; that representational harms – harms that ignore, criticize or blame minority communities, and in doing so, reinforce inequity – are a form of information warfare. This warfare is manifested through the manufacture of an imagined LGBTQ enemy, and the rationalization, normalization and monetization of stigma-driven marginalization based on that fiction. The transformation of cultural production through digital media platforms has restructured the terms by which culture is distributed and paid for. This transformation has revealed the workings of stigma-derived anti-LGBTQ economic and political purchase through the hybrid media ecosystem. The chapter identifies digiqueer criminology as an overarching framework through which to articulate the relationship between LGBTQ agency, and the technostructural forces that constrain or enable LGBTQ expression. In doing so, the chapter identifies the role of meaning making through knowledge production processes, the material value of identity, and its impact on securing LGBTQ relationship, conduct and expression rights. The chapter provides a summary of the chapters in the book.
For Love and for Life: Emotional Dynamics at the World Congress of Families
Authors: Kalm Sara , Meeuwisse Anna
Published: January 2024

The chapter explores the relationship between emotions, collective identity and mobilisation in conservative social movements through an analysis of the World Congress of Families’ (WCF) 13th international conference, held in Verona in March 2019. WCF promotes Christian family values and brings together anti-gay, anti-feminist and anti-abortion activists, religious leaders, and politicians from around the world. We attended the congress and base our analysis on observations and theories on social movements and emotions. Both positive and negative emotions as well as symbols and metaphors were used as building blocks in the emotional work that holds this conservative movement together. In order to provide a deeper understanding of the mechanisms we show how passive emotions are turned into active, how the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are constructed, and how the combination of positive and negative emotions helps motivate action.
Protecting Catatumbo: Dialogue as Conflict-Sensitive Environmentalism
Authors: Jaramillo-Marín Jefferson , López-Lizarazo Luz Mery , Ruiz-Galvan Adriel , Bishop Matthew Louis , Díaz-Arévalo Juan Mario , Kanai Juan Miguel , Lombard Melanie , Rushton Simon , Shesterinina Anastasia , Shesterinina Anastasia , Turton Helen Louise
Published: January 2024

The first of the two empirical chapters, this chapter introduces the factors that have fuelled conflict in Catatumbo, showing how this unevenly developed region – frequently stigmatized as a lawless borderland – has been subject to multiple forms of state and para-state domination and violence, yet has also produced vibrant forms of collective action and resistance. The chapter examines the recent history of resistance, in particular the 2013 agrarian strike which sought to insert local concerns around land access, autonomy and alternative livelihood opportunities onto the national peace agenda. Describing local responses to the perceived failure of the peace process’s official participatory mechanisms, the chapter documents the emergence of locally driven dialogue processes, in particular focusing on the efforts of the riverside community of La Angalia to develop a regional environmental pact involving multiple communities across the Catatumbo River Basin, and the contribution of PAR to this process.
Transforming Buenaventura: Dialogue for Municipal Peacebuilding
Authors: Jaramillo-Marín Jefferson , López-Lizarazo Luz Mery , Ruiz-Galvan Adriel , Bishop Matthew Louis , Díaz-Arévalo Juan Mario , Kanai Juan Miguel , Lombard Melanie , Rushton Simon , Shesterinina Anastasia , Shesterinina Anastasia , Turton Helen Louise
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the port city of Buenaventura as a site of experimentation for DST. The chapter looks at the multiple drivers of conflict in the city and its hinterland, including economic and racial marginalization, resource extraction and the influence of criminal actors, while also highlighting the ways in which local communities have taken action to defend their right to live in peace and with dignity. Showing how the government-sponsored post-agreement development plan was seen by communities as another iteration of planning for the reproduction of capital in the region, the chapter looks at participatory experiments for peace that emerged, drawing on indigenous and Afro-Colombian cultures and knowledges, and became powerful political forces for peace. Finally, the chapter looks at the roles played by PAR-based research in supporting and strengthening these processes.
Sex Work and COVID-19 in 2020
Authors: Easterbrook-Smith Gwyn , Easterbrook-Smith Gwyn
Published: January 2024

In 2020 New Zealand responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with a nation-wide lockdown that successfully stopped community transmission of the virus for a period of time. The impacts of the pandemic on all businesses were explored in the media. Questions about how sex workers would respond were raised very early in the response, prior to restrictions on movement and trading being introduced. Key themes in analysed media during this period included the impacts on the physical activities sex workers could perform; sex workers as community members and public health advocates; the misbehaviour of clients attempting to breach lockdown; a move towards producing online content; and sex workers’ ability to access financial support aimed at businesses. Media coverage contained elements of stigmatising narratives and stereotypes, such as the sex worker as a vector of disease, but effective uses of the media by sex workers helped to counter these. Sex work was sometimes considered alongside comparable industries, suggesting a discursive shift to being discussed in the register of work, without its status as a job first having to be justified.
The Rural-Urban Divide
Authors: Shome Parthasarathi , Shome Parthasarathi
Published: January 2024

This chapter addresses the economic and socio-economic condition of India’s rural sector. Share of GDP in agriculture has declined secularly while two-thirds of the population live in rural areas. Some analysts view rural-to-urban migration as natural with economic growth and accompanying sectoral transformation. This position is fallacious since there is evidence that individuals in rural areas would prefer to continue in rural abodes if public works or other employment were offered to them. Drivers of rural-urban migration appear to be many including lack of integrated farming, inadequate commercialization, and water pollution. These factors lead to continued relative poverty and drive rural emigration in search of employment elsewhere. Existing evidence through extrapolation of 2011–12 data to 2019–20 reveals that both rural and urban poverty headcount ratios have worsened but poverty has risen faster in rural areas.
Government policies on land and agriculture have been fallacious. Promised minimum support prices have been repeatedly ignored. In 2020–21, an extensive fast by farmers in New Delhi, the capital, exposed the extreme adverse condition of farmers over and above the high incidence of farmer suicides in particular regions. Policy has to be calibrated, for mere agricultural growth does not imply growth in farm incomes.
Nutrition, Health, Sanitation, Water and Climate Change
Authors: Shome Parthasarathi , Shome Parthasarathi
Published: January 2024

Insufficiency of nutrition, health and clean water provision, and the impact of climate change, urban pollution and lack of sanitary facilities for the poor are examined. Their inadequacy impinges directly on the poor. India’s past programmes on food security, public distribution, child development, rural health and national health insurance were introduced with fanfare but, by and large, attained limited to very limited success. There is little reliable Social Impact Assessment of government programmes.
Provision of healthcare remains among the lowest in the world, worsening down the income scale. India was behind its SDG goals for water and sanitation in 2020. Though the provision of basic facilities has improved, and open defecation decreased, the rate was slower than comparable countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Night soil removal continues to be performed mainly by the lowest castes.
Deterioration of groundwater through chemicals exacerbates poverty. Amelioration is a severe challenge despite a 2016 legislation. Local water resource management would comprise a bottom-up approach. Exposure to climate change has been daunting in various states with the worst impact on the poor as they tend to live in low-lying areas. India is 5th in the 2021 Climate Risk Index among 180 countries.
The Unheard Stories of the Rohingyas
Authors: Ullah AKM Ahsan , Chattoraj Diotima
Published: January 2024

Rohingya people have inhabited Rakhine state in Myanmar for centuries prior to colonial rule. They are considered to be one of the most persecuted minority groups in the world. Denied citizenship under Burma Citizenship Law 1982, Rohingyas were rendered stateless people in Myanmar. The atrocities perpetrated on them by Myanmar authorities can by any reckoning be called ethnic cleansing.
Much has been written about the cleansing operation carried out by Myanmar armed troops and vigilantes in 2017, which forced Rohingyas to flee to other countries. The scholarly literature has mainly ignored their means of survival in the post-2017 period. In the book, we contend that the Rohingya people of Myanmar are on the verge of extinction. More than a million of them left Myanmar and went over the border into Bangladesh, where they confronted filthy conditions. Many witnessed death, mutilation, and rape, as well as entire villages and their homes in Myanmar being burned to ashes.
This book examines the credibility of the Myanmar government’s justifications for these human rights violations. It argues that the media played a significant role in spreading narratives that, in many respects, downplayed the crisis that befell the Rohingya people. The current political climate makes it difficult to focus on the complexities of the origins of the current humanitarian crisis. This book discusses the challenges in Bangladesh of responding to a mass exodus of refugees and makes recommendations for the future.
Alternative Proteins: Bio-Mimicry, Structuring the New Protein Industry, ‘Promissory Narratives’, and ‘Substitutionism 4.0’
Authors: Goodman David
Published: January 2024

This chapter analyses the rise of the alternative proteins (AP) industry, which is a vivid example of changing spatialities in modern food systems. Plant- and cell-based protein analogues threaten to displace the farmed livestock industry by compressing time and space and redefining the meaning of urban and rural. Later sections discuss the responses of Big Meat and Big Food corporations to these innovations and the formation of ‘protein conglomerates’. AP start-ups have attracted massive funding from venture capitalists by using ‘promissory narratives’, which claim that meat substitutes can make a significant contribution to the mitigation of climate change and global hunger. These discursive claims are interrogated in the light of the recent performance of the plant-based sector, estimates of the infrastructural requirements needed to make even modest inroads into the global protein market, and recent critiques of arguments that prioritise a protein transition over a systemic sustainability transition. A final discussion emphasises that the AP industry is intensely proprietorial, with the model of food-as-software secured by food-as-intellectual property.
Waste, Money and Finance
Authors: Gregson Nicky
Published: January 2024

In this chapter, the emphasis is on the consumer discard that actually becomes waste, or residual waste as it is termed by the industry. The chapter charts the development of largely nationally bounded waste regimes and the early competition between the technologies of landfill and incineration, before documenting how for much of the world, landfill became 20th-century capitalism’s primary solution to managing wastes. It shows how, beginning in the 1990s, this waste regime has transitioned to a waste-to-resource regime and within that how landfill has been supplanted by incineration as the means to manage the world’s residual wastes. The global move to incineration has opened up major new markets for the waste industry, creating transnationals comparable in scale and scope to medium-sized car manufacturers. It has also created huge new markets for the firms who design and manufacture these plants and their core components, chiefly firms headquartered in the global North. Even more important is that the turn to energy from waste has allowed waste to be captured by finance capital. The chapter closes by elaborating on the financialization of consumer waste and its implications, showing that consumer waste has become a means to wealth generation and accumulation.
Innovation of Moral Realism and Dialogue with It
Authors: Telò Mario
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides a critique of the conceptualization of some crucial concepts in moral realism, such as bipolarity, liberalism, complex interdependence, and hegemony. The author contests that Yan’s prediction of the Sino–US bipolar structure is problematic and suggests that Yan underestimates the capability of the EU, India, Japan, Brazil, and also of Russia, as well as the role of complex interdependence and institutional resilience. From a Western perspective, he criticizes Yan for not realizing the deep political and cultural divisions within the West, which he considers to be evidence of crisis of old liberalism. In addition, he also criticizes Yan’s definition of liberalism as a narrow conceptualization of political theory. It is believed that Yan’s attachment of negative connotation to the concept of hegemony is contrary to its meaning in Western political science by referring not only to new institutionalism, and new realism, but also to the best Italian Marxism. Based on that, the author also questions with great respect Yan’s conceptualization and categorization of hegemonic leadership.
Moral Realism on Interstate Leadership in Response to Critics
Authors: Xuetong Yan
Published: January 2024

Leadership is the relationship between leaders and followers. Interstate and domestic leadership differ in nature because the former is established in an anarchic system while the latter is in a hierarchical one. To answer the question of whether IR moral realism is supposed to address leadership analysis at the individual, state, or system level, I clarify that the theory is an analysis across all three levels by treating leadership of major powers as the independent variable. This chapter explains why the morality of interstate leadership is partial, comparative, and relative and is judged according to historical context. In addition, the popularity and quality of an interstate leadership is quantifiable by the number of followers and their capability respectively. Contrary to institutionalist claims, I also stress that no political institutions, including international ones, can function without the operation of a leadership. Interstate leadership could be studied as either an independent or a dependent variable.
Neoliberal Nightlife and its Alternatives
Authors: Hollands Robert G.
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on an analyses of nightlife in the neoliberal city. Critical to this analysis will be questions surrounding the production of nightlife including globalization and corporatization; contradictions inherent in neoliberal governance and regulation; and consumption inequalities created through gentrification. Additionally, the chapter will examine alternative forms of nightlife, including a case study of ‘night protests’ in the city of Geneva. Finally, the chapter concludes by discussing the impact the pandemic has had on this sector of the cultural economy. It asks, can we move beyond neoliberal forms and create more diverse, accessible and sustainable night-time activities in the future?
Rethinking the Tourist City: Contestation and Alternative Cultural Tourism
Authors: Hollands Robert G.
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines tourism within the context of the neoliberal creative city, outlining its characteristics and shortcomings. It also focuses on examples of opposition and the need for alternatives. The first part of the chapter looks at the rise of urban tourism and briefly discusses the question of ‘who is a tourist’, as well as distinguishes between different types of tourism. It then turns to critically analyse the main features of neoliberal tourism by linking it to urban entrepreneurialism, the cultural economy and the creative city. Finally, it examines and assesses examples of tourism contestation in Barcelona, Shanghai and Berlin. The second part of the chapter centres in on a discussion of alternative cultural tourism and uses the Prague Fringe as a case study example. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion about the politics of alternative types of tourism and the need to pursue more just and sustainable forms in the future.
Creative Polarization, Division and Exclusion
Authors: Hollands Robert G.
Published: January 2024

This chapter is organized into four sections. First, it provides a wider context by looking at how neoliberal urbanization creates increased polarization between rich and poor, while ideologically blaming the less well-off for their worsening situation. Second, it discusses how the creative class paradigm ‘maps onto’ urban divisions, hiding, extending and creating new social inequalities. In particular, it focuses on the negative impact the creative class has had on the services and working classes, as well as the urban poor. It also explores how the creative class concept itself hides significant divisions and inequalities within its own ranks. Third, I explore the process of ‘creative exclusion’ through the idea of seeing disadvantaged youth as either a ‘creative underclass’ or as ‘non-creative chavs’. The final section of the chapter concludes by briefly considering some alternative ways of tackling social polarization, creative division and exclusion.
Understanding Making Information Matter Together
Authors: Kaufmann Mareile
Published: January 2024

Making Information Matter advances three ontological arguments: first, information is not virtual, but material, and it matters. It influences routines, values, politics, and how other matter comes into being. Second, information is in-formation. It changes and becomes lively as it travels across sites and co-creates phenomena. Third, the lively character of information, its materiality and agency is dependent on processes of making. Tools, infrastructures, protocols, ideas, and people are part of making information matter. You are making information matter. In societies where the influence of information is no longer put into question it is crucial to be aware of these dynamics. Only when we navigate the how and why of making information matter can we identify the openings for our own agency. I spend this chapter explaining the theoretical groundwork for the book’s argument. A combination of different sets of theories is needed to develop the ontology of Making Information Matter. Hence, reading this chapter demands more of your investment than reading any of the chapters that follow. You can choose to read chapters as standalone contributions. Familiarizing yourself with the book’s analytic base, however, can help you to appreciate the actuality and impact of the argument and provides you with the basis for the methodology, practices and ethics discussed in Chapters 3–8. This chapter argues that making, information, and matter are intertwined and that they can also be used as a set of resources for future studies. Hence, this theorization is also a vantage point or a roadmap for reading the book as a successive text: the parts on method and empirics show how the theory is doable, and the final chapter leads us to the ethos of making matter.