bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Queering Family: Modern Rainbow Families
Authors: Tao Han
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on the changing understanding of family in urban China in the context of social changes, migration, and queer politics. It investigates the concept of ‘jia’ (family/home) for Chinese non-heterosexual people through its cultural and socio-legal meanings. This chapter unfolds the various modalities of the non-heterosexual family. By capturing the emerging family-forming practices and the image of the role-model rainbow family promoted in queer communities, it stresses the dynamic interplay of socio-economic class, state law, and moral values that come to articulate queer families and relatedness in today’s queer everyday lives. It further explores how these queer family structures fluctuate between visibility and obscurity in distinct temporal and spatial contexts, thereby complicating conventional dichotomies such as assimilation versus resistance, visibility versus invisibility, and modernity versus tradition in everyday existence.
Re-inventing Plants
Authors: Braun Veit
Published: January 2025

This chapter explains how plants became patentable property objects. While European plant variety protection propertized seed as a uniform, tradeable farm input, contemporary US legislation focused on new and unique plant characteristics. With the molecular turn in plant breeding, however, new possibilities for propertizing plants emerged: DNA as a molecule gave rise to an understanding life along the lines of chemistry while the Bayh-Dole Act and the Diamond v. Chakrabarty ruling led to a surge in biopatents. Genetic manipulation finally allowed for appropriating plant genes materially, which prompted European countries to introduce another layer of intellectual property on top of plant variety protection. Genes and biotechnology served as catalysts for a legal and economic paradigm change: even after the demise of transgenic plants in Europe, patents persisted as a complementary yet contradictory form of property. This development eventually culminated in the Broccoli/Tomatoes II case, in which the patentability of conventional seed was affirmed, threatening to disrupt established breeding practices and seed markets.
The Values of Patents
Authors: Braun Veit
Published: January 2025

Both mainstream economics and political economy often assume that property erects a fence around value that would otherwise be accessible to others. This chapter seeks to complicate the idea that there is value ‘in’ property by asking different stakeholders in the Broccoli/Tomatoes II debate how they draw value, positive or negative, from their or others’ patents. While for some companies patents indeed enclose the results of investments in plant breeding, other firms instead use them as a bulwark against hostile business practices. But patents can also be monopoly machines, bargaining chips, signals of innovativeness, vehicles for financialization and speculation or assets that extract lasting revenues from farmers. The difficulty of judging their value for the plant breeding industry and society as a whole stems from this multiplicity of patent values and their mutual entanglement: reigning in one specific way of making value from patents will also affect other business practices that have emerged around them over time.
The Shape of Belonging for Unaccompanied Young Migrants
Authors: Ögtem-Young Özlem
Published: January 2025

This book offers a novel and ground-breaking understanding of the concept of belonging, seizing its complexities, multiplicities, shifts and ruptures through the accounts of the lived experiences of unaccompanied young people. It investigates the conditions and nature of belonging reconfigured by unaccompanied young people within the UK asylum system while dealing with the challenges of displacement and resettlement. Through a rich and unique empirical and theoretical analysis, it casts new light on the nature, the constituents and the workings of belonging within conditions of displacement. Arguing against the binaries of ‘belonging/unbelonging’ and the prevailing notions and dichotomies of belonging as ‘feeling-at-home’/‘politics of belonging’, the book offers a nomadic, rhizomatic understanding of belonging, uniquely highlighting the virtuality of belonging as real, wherein belonging is tied to possibility and potentiality as well as to actuality. This book is a testament to the complicated, troubled and paradoxical experiences of belonging under highly constrained and precarious conditions of the UK’s asylum system. It provides compelling accounts of belonging with all of its ruptures, tensions and inconsistencies. It is a powerful scholarly examination of the complexity and multiplicity, the tenacity and tenuousness of the belonging of unaccompanied young people seeking asylum in the UK.
Introduction: Tracing Nader – Displacement, Unaccompanied Young People and Belonging
Authors: Ögtem-Young Özlem
Published: January 2025

This chapter sets the scene for and gives context to an in-depth, theoretically informed study of the belonging of unaccompanied young people seeking asylum in the UK. It begins by introducing the story of displacement, migration and belonging of one of the participants. The participant’s accounts of the challenges of migrating to and resettling in the UK provide an anchor into which the analysis of the main findings are woven in the coming chapters.
‘Disassembling’ and ‘Reassembling’ Belonging
Authors: Ögtem-Young Özlem
Published: January 2025

This chapter introduces the main conceptual and theoretical resources of the book after giving an in-depth, critical appraisal of the existing conceptual literature on belonging, exposing its limitations in understanding the complexity and multiplicity of the notion of belonging in general and the belonging of unaccompanied migrants more specifically. It discusses in detail Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical terms of assemblage, molar, molecular and nomadic lines alongside others and shows their value in developing the concept of belonging and in our understanding of the belonging of unaccompanied young people in precarious positions. This chapter argues the case for a new conceptual understanding of belonging that is capable of capturing the shifts, multiplicities, complexities and paradoxes in experiencing and conceiving belonging in migration in relation to those in precarious positions.
Tracing Molar Lines: Border, Immigration and Asylum Policy and Unaccompanied Young People
Authors: Ögtem-Young Özlem
Published: January 2025

This is the first chapter that presents an analysis of the empirical work undertaken to understand the experiences of unaccompanied migrants. The first section presents a data analysis of the unaccompanied migrants’ experiences of their journeys to the UK, which often involve risks to their lives and prolonged stays in transit countries, as well as them facing calamitous situations and exploitation. An analysis of the data related to unaccompanied migrants’ experiences within the asylum system and its related procedures is then introduced. Alsoresented are the data on the effects of these on unaccompanied young people’s everyday lives and the configurations of their belonging in the UK through the adoption of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘molar line’ and ‘affect’ as the main conceptual tools, alongside the notion of ‘violence’. The key argument of this chapter is that the border/immigration and asylum policies and practices, and the understanding of belonging within these structures and apparatuses, are all understood as molar forces that produce harm and violence while functioning to remove, disrupt and erase the belonging of unaccompanied young people.
Emotions in Crisis
Authors: Margies Nina
Published: January 2025

We usually speak of crisis in numbers: a decline in purchasing power, a rise in unemployment rates or decreasing levels of life satisfaction. But what do people feel when their supposed securities for their futures crumble? The stories of the young adults after the 2008 economic crisis in Spain provide us with answers. This book shows how their loss of future prospects led to feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, frustration and resentment, and what they did to deal with these emotions. Combining the sociology of emotions with Bourdieu’s practice theory, Emotions in Crisis analyses the impact of structural changes in society on individual and collective emotions. It shows that adapting to such changes involves ‘emotion work’ and highlights the different forms this work can take.
Systemic Frames and Collective Spaces for Emotion Work
Authors: Margies Nina
Published: January 2025

This chapter shows that when the young people resorted to systemic frames, they explained their experiences with the changed circumstances and considered their situation as a product of economic and political developments. Here, ‘changing the chip’ had a different function: it was about acknowledging that they felt uncertain, anxious or frustrated and that this was perfectly OK. They therefore tried not to direct these emotions inwards and against themselves, but outwards and towards the social causes. Frames of systemic failure thus opened up more possibilities for validating frustration and anger (also) with others, resulting in collective spaces for emotion work. These spaces were important as they gave them the opportunity to develop an awareness of shared experiences through encounters with others. They provided a space for sharing, expressing and validating emotions which the young people felt were inappropriate elsewhere. This chapter shows that young people who found such possibilities to produce collectively spaces in which they could ‘move’ the social conflict differed quite considerably from those who could not. This highlights the power of collective sharing and points to the transformative potential of such self-organized forms of organization and action.
Anger and Work
Authors: Margies Nina
Published: January 2025

This chapter shows how referring to anger enabled some of the young people to reject the sense of powerlessness that resulted both from their situations of impasse and their precarious working environments. Anger thus served as a source of empowerment and a mobilizing force for individual or collective action. Yet whether anger helped the young people to communicate where they wished to stand or whether they experienced it as boundary depended on 1) intersections of class, ethnicity and gender and 2) on whether the anger was supported by a collective (for example, the union) or whether it was experienced as an individual emotion that could not be expressed openly or could not be afforded at all. Different forms of anger are presented: collective, isolated and absent anger. This ties in with Chapters 4 and 5 on individualistic and systemic framing of emotions, showing that anger is a power emotion with the potential to initiate social change, while the right and capacity to do so is unequally distributed within society.
The Imaginary of Digital Transformation
Authors: Trauttmansdorff Paul
Published: January 2025

Chapter 2 studies the sociotechnical imaginary of digital transformation of the eu-LISA agency. It locates this relatively young agency as an emerging and increasingly important site for assembling and rehearsing this imaginary, and how it thereby gradually transforms borders into sites of experimentation in the EU Schengen laboratory. It traces the core narrative threads that compose the imaginary and examines their repeated performances. Chapter 2 suggests understanding this imaginary as a shared vision of the future that materializes in eu-LISA’s projects and activities; the imaginary thus opens up or closes down specific sociotechnical realizations and tacitly governs the project of digitally infrastructuring the border regime.
Coda
Authors: Trauttmansdorff Paul
Published: January 2025

This chapter offers a short postscript. It addresses the repercussions of two recent developments: the increased use of Artificial Intelligence in the realm of border and migration control as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. It reflects on the controversies surrounding these phenomena and discusses their potential impact on transforming border infrastructures in the future.
Reproducing Whiteness via Its Disavowal
Authors: Montalva Barba Miguel
Published: January 2025

The reproduction of Whiteness in this progressive community is done by its disavowal, which at the same time reconstitutes Whiteness. Research participants and protest graffiti outline the disavowal of Whiteness using the figurations of the White family, child, women, and community to make sense of their lives, emplacement, and the processes taking place in this gentrifying borough. These figurations allow White residents to avoid any potential guilt and accountability for the processes they are aware they are advancing.
“Don’t Talk to Me about Race, Talk to People of Color”
Authors: Montalva Barba Miguel
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on forms of racism not covered in other parts of the book. The chapter outlines how White interview respondents talk about race, racism, and racial politics. The interview respondents use four main devices to speak about race and racism, but what was central was their utility of the racial Other to (re)create their Whiteness. White Jamaica Plain interviewees often used ethnic restaurants and food options to speak and think about diversity. Ultimately, this chapter shows the work of racecraft, in which participants disconnect race from racism.
The Politics of Intersectional Practice
Authors: Christoffersen Ashlee
Published: January 2025

This is the first book to explore how both practitioners and policymakers understand how to operationalize the Black feminist theory of ‘intersectionality’ – and with what effect. It is also the first to explore how intersectionality has been applied in practice in the UK – an important case study since its internationally unique unification of equality legislation and architecture creates opportunities to consider the interactions of inequalities. Focusing on non-governmental racial justice, feminist, LGBTI, migrants’ and disability rights organizations (NGOs), the book demonstrates that there is not one but five applied meanings given to ‘intersectionality’ in equality organizing and policy. This is an integral insight because some of these advance intersectional justice and are politically transformative, while others in spite of being named as ‘intersectionality’ actually serve to further entrench inequalities. Intersectional practice is about (a) representation (not only who is represented, but also whether and how to represent), and (b) coalition and solidarity, and conflicts around each are driven by these competing concepts of intersectionality; in other words, competing concepts are at the heart of the politics of who does intersectionality, and how. Intersectionality’s operationalization necessitates a focus on common issues and intersectionally marginalized identities, including emergent ones. NGOs can build greater unity through developing shared understandings of intersectionality, and work to balance acting in solidarity while prioritizing the agency of those who are intersectionally marginalized.
Introduction: Equality Policy, the NGO Sector and Intersectionality
Authors: Christoffersen Ashlee
Published: January 2025

Race, class, gender and gender identity, disability status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality, migration status and faith remain salient markers of inequality in the UK, and in many ways increasingly so. Yet these inequalities have predominantly been addressed separately. Since little progress has been made by the separate single-issue approach in terms of achieving equality for the most marginalized, there is growing recognition that pursuing social justice requires policymakers and organizations to engage with intersectionality. This chapter discusses the author’s positionality; outlines the context: UK equality policy, which has been an important driver engendering current policy and NGO sector interest in intersectionality; and describes the equality NGO sector. Then, the chapter provides an overview of the book’s core arguments, explains the research underpinning it and outlines the chapters.
Representation: The Politics of Intersectionality in Practice
Authors: Christoffersen Ashlee
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores issues of representation (who is represented, and whether and how to represent) in efforts to operationalize intersectionality. This chapter asks, in what ways does it matter who uses intersectionality, and for whom? How can practitioners go about representation to advance intersectional justice? The chapter analyses self-organization, and the extent to which single-issue equality organizations and networks of them represent equality ‘communities’ and those who are intersectionally marginalized within them; explores the relationship between representation and intersectionality in equality organizing; and explores conflicting perspectives on representation. Many participants perceive that intersectional practice is fundamentally about: (i) representation of those who are intersectionally marginalized, and previously excluded, and (ii) the question of representation, namely: whether, and how, to represent. It is argued that competing concepts of intersectionality create conflicting views on and approaches to representation. Issues of representation also influence which concepts of intersectionality are employed by participants, in a cyclical relationship.
Setting the Stage: Politics, Violence and Peripheral Cities in Colombia and El Salvador
Authors: García Pinzón Viviana
Published: January 2025

This chapter briefly introduces the main characteristics of Colombia’s and El Salvador’s national contexts, emphasizing the complex relationship between politics and violence from a historical perspective, and the impact of the latter on urbanization processes. It also examines the trends in peripheral cities. The chapter is structured around three assumptions: first, Colombia and El Salvador are political regimes in which elements of formal democracy co-exist with authoritarian institutions and violence; second, in both cases, urbanization processes are closely intertwined with the dynamics of violence experienced by these countries; and third, while violence has affected peripheral cities in both there is significant variation between cases and across time. The analytical framework developed here serves as the basis for the case studies examined in subsequent chapters. Considering the intricacies of the relationship between order and violence, the contrasts in quantitative trends across cases hint at the existence of violent orders in some cities but not in others. This raises the crucial question of why the occurrence of violence varies across cities – or, more specifically, why and how some have become loci of violent orders while others have not.
Trajectories of Governance: Ecologies, Citizenship and Varieties of Order
Authors: García Pinzón Viviana
Published: January 2025

Drawing on the combination of different strands of the literature on processual and political sociology with insights stemming from conflict and peace research, this chapter develops a comprehensive framework to address the relationship between local order and violence. Such a framework provides a heuristic for studying the commonalities and differences in the nexus between order and violence across cases and approaching their transformation considering spatiotemporal entanglements. Governance serves to articulate the link between order and violence. The chapter develops this articulation through the crucible of ecologies of governance, citizenship agendas and trajectories of governance. After developing the conceptual structure, the chapter lays out a typology of local orders. It delves here into definitions of ‘violent order’ and ‘grey-zone governance’, as well as into the characterization of state- and society-led orders. The established framework and typology set the basis for the empirical analysis developed in the subsequent chapters, in which within-case studies depict the different types of local order outlined in the typology and elaborate on the role of violence in the workings of governance and order-making.
Sonsonate: Violent Order and Local Governance
Authors: García Pinzón Viviana
Published: January 2025

Within the parameters of this book, Sonsonate City constitutes a typical case, illustrating the configuration of a violent order based on a trajectory in which persistent state-sponsored violence, state neglect, socioeconomic exclusion, economic stagnation and a frayed social fabric have converged. Besides that, Sonsonate exemplifies also the complex interaction between repertoires and levels of violence within the framework of violent orders and the problem of reducing the phenomenon merely to homicide. Despite the significant reduction in the latter over time, non-lethal forms of violence remain endemic. This chapter traces the emergence of a violent order in Sonsonate City and the effects on governance, local citizenship and state–society relations. Likewise, it examines the drivers of lethal violence and the implications thereof for the local order. The trajectory of governance and violence in Sonsonate challenge state-centric approaches to urban forms of the latter, demonstrating the crucial relevance of challenging assumptions on stateness – as the necessary starting point in any related analysis. Violence is not the outcome of state absence but rather of the specific characteristics of state formation and presence in El Salvador.
Chalatenango: Violence Contention and Governance in a Society-Led Order
Authors: García Pinzón Viviana
Published: January 2025

This chapter develops a study of the municipality of Chalatenango. The type of local order in Chalatenango is defined as society-led, that is, an order shaped by an ecology of governance in which societal actors play a crucial role as public goods providers and violence regulators. The analysis shows that community organization and translocal dynamics are crucial to explaining violence containment. Local communities have managed to control the levels of lethal violence and deter criminal actors amid a national context characterized by state neglect and chronic violence. Community organization is not territorially bound but extends across transnational networks. Migrants are a source of livelihoods for the local population; they also contribute to providing public goods and participate in local forms of organization. Transnational networks have forged a migration corridor that enables immigration to the United States. In doing this, outmigration has worked as a safety valve that relieves social tensions and reduces grievances. Additionally, community organization informally contributes to the capacity of the local state to perform its functions, thereby shaping cooperative state–society relations.
Speed-Focused Managerialism
Authors: Yates Shaun S.
Published: January 2025

This chapter explores the theme of ‘speed-focused managerialism’ within the summary justice process. It critically analyses the roles of district judges and magistrates as managerial leaders and examines the cooperative case management practices of solicitors. The chapter also delves into how workgroups manage defendants, emphasizing the problematic impact of managerial, efficiency-focused approaches on the justice process. This analysis provides a nuanced understanding of the managerial culture in courts and its influence on the pace and nature of legal proceedings.
Court Users’ Procedural Adversity
Authors: Yates Shaun S.
Published: January 2025

The chapter details how the summary justice process is challenging for court users because of the nature of oral evidence-giving processes and also because the courts place significant externalities on defendants. This chapter provides a comprehensive understanding of the procedural difficulties within the justice system. A key focus of discussion in this chapter is how the summary justice process is not fair for court users.
Overcoming Over-Efficiency
Authors: Yates Shaun S.
Published: January 2025

Building from the prior data analysis chapters, this chapter argues that the courts are largely characterized by the concept of over-efficiency (as first discussed in Chapter 1). This chapter then offers six efficiency-focused policy reforms that would enhance the lower criminal court process. The evidence-based reform recommendations presented in this chapter argue for slower justice in some contexts, more specialized services and a shift towards creating an adversity-free process for court users.
A Desire for Equality
Authors: Lallement Michel
Published: January 2025

Since the late 1960s, men and women have decided to project their ‘dreams forward’ by choosing to live in community. To counter capitalist society and bring their ideals to life, they have built concrete utopias. To understand the logic and scope of these multiple initiatives, we need to ask not only who the ‘communards’ were, but also what they were doing. In other words, we need to examine how they put into practice the utopias they claimed for themselves, on a daily basis. Such is the ambition of this book. It examines the continuities and recompositions of the community worlds of yesterday and today. The fruit of several years’ research, it focuses in particular on ‘intentional communities’ in the United States, which have adopted egalitarian principles of life and work. It focuses on Twin Oaks, Virginia, one of the oldest and largest of these communities.While accommodations with society and internal disputes complicate the assessment of half a century of original social experimentation, everything indicates that, far from the archaic trace of a bygone world to which some have tried to reduce them, utopian communities have today become ferments capable of fertilizing our future.
Desire for Equality and Forward Dreams
Authors: Lallement Michel
Published: January 2025

The introduction defines the main object of the book – intentional communities – and offers a brief historical perspective on their development in the United States. It then situates the study within the field of the sociology of concrete utopias and prefigurative politics. After detailing the methodology (essentially ethnographic) and the fieldwork (in Virginia), it presents the plan of the book.
Towards a Society of Communities?
Authors: Lallement Michel
Published: January 2025

The conclusion begins by describing the transformation of the social space of intentional communities since the 1970s (evolution in the number of communities, invention of new forms such as ecovillages…). It mentions the increasingly important role of the Foundation for Intentional Community. Finally, it suggests distinguishing four mechanisms of social change that intentional communities can spearhead (bubble, contamination, alliance, multiplication).
Burdens of Legacy: Enumerative Accountability in Digital Markets
Authors: Parthasarathi Vibodh
Published: January 2025

In debates on media governance over the last 50 years, anxieties of audience measurement have recurrently occupied centre stage. But platformization of the legacy news business has reconfigured the past regime of enumerating audience. This chapter makes sense of the emergent regime by forwarding the idea of enumerative accountability. I posit the current regime of enumerating news audience in the history of audience measurement associated with newspapers and broadcast news in India. This helps me to distil recurrent and incremental challenges of accountability and transparency in the business of audience measurement and how this plays out in digital news markets.
The Political Economic Process of ‘Platformization’: The Historical Trajectory of Alibaba
Authors: Yuan Elaine J. , Zhang Lin
Published: January 2025

Through an account of the development of Alibaba, China’s leading e-commerce and tech firm, in the past two decades, this chapter argues that platformization, the process in which a company expands into multiple interconnected markets with significant implications for the existing socioeconomic institutions, is not simply a result of applications of digital technology or the reorganization of the corporate structure. It is instead premised on multi-faceted transformations of broad social economic structures, institutions, and norms. Set in this framework, this chapter demonstrates that Alibaba’s growth has taken place as a set of historically and culturally specific processes and relations constituted by constantly shifting and interacting forces in China in responding to the global convergence of technological and economic development.
Efficient and Illegitimate: Legitimacy Problems in the Platform Model
Authors: Gregersen Andreas , Ørmen Jacob
Published: January 2025

This chapter applies classic organization theory to outline inherent legitimacy issues with the multi-sided market model of digital media platforms. Drawing on resource dependence and institutional theory, it argues that the lean outsourced platform structure is highly efficient but creates problems of legitimacy. Using YouTube as an illustrative case, it outlines three key legitimacy problems arising from mismatches between platform operations and environmental demands: problematic content, users and practices. It discusses YouTube’s strategic response as a shift from pure advertising intermediary towards cultivation of brand-safe and highly aligned creators integrated with e-commerce. The chapter concludes that integrating insights from organizational theory can explain how the platform model’s pursuit of efficiency leads to compromised legitimacy, requiring evolution of the model itself.
Player-Driven Economies and ‘Money at the Margins’: Game Items as Contingent Commodity Money
Authors: Thorhauge Anne Mette
Published: January 2025

In this chapter I analyse the Steam platform and the third-party websites that utilize its infrastructure as a monetary network that transforms game items into units of transaction comparable to conventional money. I address the way in which the business model of Steam has evolved from that of a storefront into that of a ‘tangled market’, and in extension of this I describe how this quest to integrate player-driven economies into the platform’s revenue model has extended beyond the platform into a wider system of third-party websites where game items are traded, gambled, and rewarded in ways that increase their status as units of transaction. I discuss the characteristics of game items in comparison to other type of commodity money foregrounding their ‘contingency’ on the platform from which they originate.
Theorizing Assemblages and Feminist Technoscience
Authors: Hobbs Jenn
Published: January 2025

This chapter lays out the book’s theoretical framework, and explains how the book engages the idea of ‘bodies’ and ‘bodily fluids’. The first section of the chapter introduces the concept of assemblage, and offers a reading of ‘the body’ as an assemblage. It outlines feminist critiques of assemblage theory, and proposes turning to feminist technoscience studies (FTS) to think through the body-assemblage. FTS, the chapter shows, offers resources for us to act upon our queerfeminist curiosity. The chapter argues that FTS offers two important insights on assemblage. Firstly, that body-assemblages should be understood as particular and, secondly, that the boundaries of the body-assemblage are uncertain. The chapter then turns to a theorization of bodily fluids, arguing bodily fluids should be understand through queer logics as both/and substances. It then introduces the term life–death to conceptualize the forms of relationships that bodily fluids can set in motion between bodies.
Racializing Fluids: Vomit, Airports and the 2013–16 Ebola Pandemic
Authors: Hobbs Jenn
Published: January 2025

This chapter follows vomit through airport exit-screening assemblages during the 2013–16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The chapter explores how and why vomit was constructed as a security threat, arguing that a distribution of life–death was achieved through a greater surveillance of West Africa bodies. Ultimately the chapter argues that airport screening assemblages worked to perpetuate discourses that reinstantiate race as a meaningful form of bodily differentiation. The chapter begins by giving some empirical context, before arguing that screening technologies are based upon colonial and gendered gazes that attempt to render West African bodies as ‘governable’. The chapter then shows how screening assemblages worked to quarantine and naturalize Ebola virus disease within west Africa, looking at cultural depictions of Ebola ‘vomit’ to think this through.
Securing Cisheterosexuality: Semen and Genitourinary Injuries
Authors: Hobbs Jenn
Published: January 2025

This chapter follows semen through treatment assemblages for US service members with genitourinary injuries (GUIs). The chapter argues that current treatments attempt to regulate flows of semen, and thus the bodies of service members, according to normative frames of sex, gender and race. The chapter starts by outlining the scope and prevalence of GUIs in the US military, and shows how GUIs are often understood as damaging to masculinity. The chapter then explores how GUIs are ‘fixed’ through the regulation of semen, looking at both medical and surgical treatments for GUIs. The chapter shows how these treatments normalize cisgender, heterosexual masculine bodies as possessing ‘seminal capacity’. The chapter then looks at GUIs among Iraqi and Afghan populations during US-led wars, arguing that sexualized/sexed distributions of life–death at ‘home’ are bound up in racialized/sexualized distributions of life–death ‘abroad’.
Concluding Is the Wrong Verb
Authors: Hobbs Jenn
Published: January 2025

The final chapter of the book returns to feminist technoscience studies (FTS), to consider the unique contributions FTS has for thinking about biopolitics. The chapter outlines two key contributions from FTS to the study of biopolitics. Firstly, the chapter argues that biopolitical governance is at work in everyday and mundane spaces. Secondly, FTS shows us that the ‘bios’ of biopolitics should not be considered universal human matter; instead, it is always already racialized/sexed/gendered. The chapter finishes by considering the significance of bodily fluids for studying future emergent health issues, and offers a sketch of how bodily fluids may be able to help illuminate the politics of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.
Two Decades of Dealing with Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in Peacekeeping and Aid
Authors: Westendorf Jasmine-Kim , Dolan-Evans Elliot
Published: January 2025

In October 2023, 20 years after the United Nations (UN) ‘zero tolerance’ policy on sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) was promulgated, the UN reported that nine South African peacekeepers serving in the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo had been linked to ‘systematic widespread violation’ of the zero tolerance policy and, moreover, that they had physically assaulted and threatened UN Police officers investigating their conduct. This was one in a string of news reports demonstrating the persistence of SEA perpetrated by peacekeepers and humanitarian aid workers against both local communities and colleagues despite over 20 years of efforts globally to prevent and ensure accountability for such misconduct. This chapter charts the history and patterns of the phenomenon of SEA in peacekeeping and aid, as well as the trajectory of policy responses. It considers the key challenges that persist in efforts to ‘deal with’ SEA and situates them within the context of the broader reckoning the UN and aid sector are having with questions of power centring on diversity, equity and exclusion and their corresponding localization, anti-racism and decolonization movements. The chapter sets foundations for understanding the effectiveness and unintended consequences of efforts to prevent and respond to SEA and charts a course for scholars and practitioners to better approach this complex and critically important issue.
Introduction: Autocracy and Its People
Authors: Shih Chih-yu
Published: January 2025

This book relies on Confucianism to explore contemporary socialist governmentality in China and asks how, empirically as well as theoretically, China’s autocratic practices have strategized mainly Confucianism’s great ideas in different contexts as reification, revision, or resistance in terms of human relations of dominance and belonging. Chinese autocracy has been incomprehensible to a social science that is preoccupied with liberal assumptions about the rights of nature, particularly since the literature does not attend to the relational governmentality through which the autocrat and the people constitute each other. This book integrates Chinese autocratic governmentality into a cosmological translation that is informed by the hearts of the people to enable the self-unlearning of the Chinese autocrats and their Western watchers and create a more inclusive, non-binary understanding of both autocracy and democracy worldwide.
Governing Hong Kong by Loving the Nation
Authors: Shih Chih-yu
Published: January 2025

Chapter 3 elaborates on the autocratic governmentality that is challenged by the culture of solidarity. Comparing Western and Chinese political thought, the chapter pays particular attention to differential love for relational others, as opposed to universal love for humanity. Specifically, it will employ Confucianism to illustrate this kind of differential love – benevolent love between the autocrat and their claimed population. Benevolent love is, therefore, hierarchical rather than equal and yet potentially universal, because all necessarily play a role in the Confucian hierarchy, and yet are peculiarly equal nonetheless, to the extent that different identities outside these roles do not invite discrimination or even matter. It will also employ the concept of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (OCTS), which is Beijing’s policy for arranging Hong Kong’s way of belonging to China, to illustrate how the belief in benevolent love has caused a sense of repulsion toward the OCTS and critiques of it among those subscribing to a belief in universal love. Ironically, among activists who insist on Hong Kong’s autonomy, a differential sense of solidarity develops and challenges Beijing’s pursuit of benevolent unity.
Pandemic Nationalism from Wuhan to across China
Authors: Shih Chih-yu
Published: January 2025

Drawing on the case of the Wuhan pandemic in 2019, Chapter 4 considers how nationalist discourses, informed by the culture of unity, took root and were transformed within China’s autocratic context during the period of quarantine. Following this, it adopts a relational perspective to argue that, just as the COVID-19 pandemic spotlighted countries’ vulnerability to all forms of nationalism and the danger that this represented, it also revealed an irony: that, despite being treated as a ‘solution’ to the pandemic, nationalism could only exist and thrive insofar as its ‘alter’ – represented by the novel coronavirus itself and, for some countries, the ‘China threat’ – also thrived. Given that nationalism rarely lasts long or enjoys much stability, Chapter 4 contends that, empirically as well as philosophically, nationalism is no solution to crises and that new thinking on coexistence is the vaccine needed to stabilize the post-COVID-19 world order.
Xi Jinping’s Quest for Acceptance
Authors: Shih Chih-yu
Published: January 2025

This chapter studies Chinese President Xi Jinping’s political ideas as his references to self-in-relation, rather than his schema to assess and treat alters-in-relation. In addition to facilitating the assessment of the world and policymaking, personality may cause the political actors to use ideas conversely: to engage in self-preparation for acceptance and welcome by their perceived constituencies. In terms of Xi Jinping’s evolving personality, his initial need to overcome a sense of vulnerability due to a failure to belong was satisfied through coalescence into the masses. Xi’s personality has grown into a quest for popularity through the mass line, informed by 1) a Buddhist thread of transcendence in terms of anti-corruption purges while practising the Party self, 2) a Confucian thread of unity to produce self-disciplining cadres and an affluent society while practising the national self, and 3) a socialist thread of materialism to meet the needs of the world while practising the international self. The illustrative programmes include anti-corruption, the Chinese dream of anti-poverty, and the shared future of humankind. The chapter likewise discusses how an autocracy can suffer involution.
A Pluriversal Dialogue with Ubuntu
Authors: Shih Chih-yu
Published: January 2025

Chapter 7 seeks to bring the relational concepts of Southern African Ubuntu and Chinese Tianxia into a dialogue. It compares the ontological and epistemological positions of Tianxia and Ubuntu and elaborates on the implications of the encounters between these two lenses. They similarly treat the self and the universe as mutually constituted relations. As both inspire the spontaneous pursuit of multiple relations, they can serve as either a resource or a constraint to preach autocratic governmentality. Ubuntu is closer to the micro-universe, while Tianxia lies at the macro end of the spectrum. Ubuntu is often criticized for being used/idealized as a macro theory. As this chapter argues, however, the pluriverse is co-constituted by both the micro and the macro. The chapter likewise translates the Western notion of the state of nature as well as both Ubuntu and Tianxia into a universal language to adapt them to suit an audience who lies outside each’s familiar cultural zones. Such communication reveals how the coexistence of different cosmological relations is plausible, unilateral assimilation is unlikely, and pluriversalism is always an ongoing process.
Conclusion: Balancing Dominance and Belonging
Authors: Shih Chih-yu
Published: January 2025

Democracy and, for that matter, autocracy are not about measuring rights or equality, but about balancing dominance and belonging. To that extent, it is unlikely to empathize with how the Chinese socialist autocracy evolves without analyzing the governmental impacts of Confucianism. This book suggests that neither democracy nor autocracy can operate without a level of relational imagination to prepare the members of its political system to mind the needs of each other, especially between those acting in the name of the authorities and their people. Relational governmentality attends to the systemic capacity for limiting any system from segregating and suppressing the people. Democracy and autocracy, as stereotypical categories, can each suffer such involution but tentatively adopt each other’s relational style when attempting to restore the relational default. These cycles of relational order and chaos are not uniquely liberal or Confucian. In a nutshell, autocracy and democracy are not linear in time, nor binary in space, since the same population is always capable of shifting between relationalities that yield the two categories. Rather, the same processes of belonging and dominance constitute them.
Beyond Methodological Fordism: The Case for Incorporated Comparisons
Authors: Gallas Alexander
Published: January 2025

The commitment to taking seriously a global angle is at odds with a lot of research in the fields of political economy and labour studies. Single country case studies and comparative studies of a small number of countries are common currency. Both have contributed significantly to our understanding of different capitalist social formations and the fact that institutions and configurations of actors at the national level matter and differ. Through establishing differences and communalities across national states, they enhance our understanding of what the capitalist mode of production is, and what specificities of macroregional or national contexts are. Many of those studies exhibit a research strategy that can be called ‘methodological Fordism’. With this term, I refer to a set of methodological choices starting from the implicit assumption that Fordism is the standard mode of capitalist development. This does not mean that all research in this mould studies ‘Fordist’ or ‘post-Fordist’ configurations or uses the corresponding terminology. My point is that it has a family resemblance with scholarship that explicitly does so and shares with it a number of guiding assumptions: the primary unit of analysis is the national state; the study of manufacturing and of the labour relations in the sector – frequently referred to as ‘industrial relations’ (see Nowak, 2021) – are key to understanding national political economies; and contemporary capitalism can be deciphered by focusing on a relatively small number of highly industrialized core countries.
Teacher Professionalism and the Coloniality of Power
Authors: Tikly Leon , Mitchell Rafael , Barrett Angeline M. , Batra Poonam , Pardo Alexandra Bernal , Cameron Leanne , Coles Alf , Juma Zawadi Richard , Nunez Nidia Aviles , Paulson Julia , Reda Nigusse Weldemariam , Rowsell Jennifer , Tusiime Michael , Villaveces Beatriz Vejarano
Published: January 2025

Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s concept of the ‘coloniality of power’ is used to understand the emergence of mass education systems in the global South as a context for teacher professionalism. Here, the coloniality of power refers to the dominance of former colonizing powers in economic and political terms and provides a way of conceiving the state in the context of contemporary globalization. The main arguments developed in this chapter are that global discourses do not consider the colonial and postcolonial legacies in how teacher professionalism is defined, understood and implemented. Teacher professionalism has developed under very different conditions in formerly colonized as compared to formerly colonizing countries. The chapter goes on to consider how the coloniality of power shapes national education policy in formerly colonized countries, including the increasing privatization of education.
Teacher Professionalism and the Coloniality of Being
Authors: Tikly Leon , Mitchell Rafael , Barrett Angeline M. , Batra Poonam , Pardo Alexandra Bernal , Cameron Leanne , Coles Alf , Juma Zawadi Richard , Nunez Nidia Aviles , Paulson Julia , Reda Nigusse Weldemariam , Rowsell Jennifer , Tusiime Michael , Villaveces Beatriz Vejarano
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers the effects of the foregoing dimensions of coloniality (of power and of knowledge) on teachers’ lives, emotionally and materially. Evidence from this study positions teachers at the ‘sharp end’ of the societal and systemic problems addressed in previous chapters – working with irrelevant and overly challenging curricula, in languages many learners cannot understand, in underfunded and overcrowded classrooms, while receiving an inadequate and undignified salary. Viewing teacher professionalism through the lens of the ‘coloniality of being’ reveals a systematic disregard for the material and emotional well-being of teachers in the global South.
Towards a Practitioner-Led Understanding of Teacher Professionalism
Authors: Tikly Leon , Mitchell Rafael , Barrett Angeline M. , Batra Poonam , Pardo Alexandra Bernal , Cameron Leanne , Coles Alf , Juma Zawadi Richard , Nunez Nidia Aviles , Paulson Julia , Reda Nigusse Weldemariam , Rowsell Jennifer , Tusiime Michael , Villaveces Beatriz Vejarano
Published: January 2025

This chapter draws together the evidence and analysis from the study to present a practitioner-led model of teacher professionalism in the global South which builds on previous work by UNESCO and Education International. In advancing understandings of teacher professionalism in these contexts, this study illustrates the importance of engaging with teachers’ perspectives and voices to inform global debates and decision making.