bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: conceptualising Co-Creation as a methodology
Authors: Horvath Christina , Carpenter Juliet
Published: May 2021

The introduction defines the concept of ‘Co-Creation’ as a participatory knowledge practice involving artists, researchers, and non-academic communities in the creation of collaboratively produced artefacts and shared understanding. The first section reflects on the urgency of engaging civil society groups and communities carrying knowledges related to the epistemologies of the Global South in knowledge production for a better understanding of processes of urban marginalisation and resistance to oppression. After discussing how Co-Creation, as defined in this volume, compares with concurrent terms such as co-production and other uses of co-creation, the authors introduce a set of ten principles designed to guide the ethos and practical methods of Co-Creation practice. The next section explores, through practice into its methodology, how Co-Creation can work towards challenging marginalisation and empowering communities to effectuate lasting change towards more socially-just cities. The final section explains the structure of the book, outlining the aims of the two main parts and briefly summarises each chapter.
Fostering artistic citizenship: how Co-Creation can awaken civil imagination
Authors: Peschard María José Pantoja
Published: May 2021

This chapter adopts a theoretical approach in order to discuss how the collaborative artistic-creative projects that are essential to Co-Creation can help to make visible the conditions of marginalisation within and beyond the communities where they take place. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay’s concept of ‘civil imagination,’ the chapter argues that Co-Creation contributes to awakening the skill of civil imagination by building relations of solidarity and respect between participants. Such relationships serve to reflect critically upon the power relations that are the causes underpinning social disparities within our societies. Thus, civil imagination is necessarily linked with an exercise in ‘artistic citizenship’, which entails a commitment to engaging in collaborative art projects that stimulate positive interactions among participants, and hence the improvement of communal well-being. The chapter concludes that Co-Creation has the potential to promote among the participants the sense of a community in which their opinions are heard and counted.
Can literary events use Co-Creation to challenge stigmatisation?
Authors: Horvath Christina
Published: May 2021

This chapter takes a comparative approach to two initiatives developed by artists and cultural promoters from the Global North and South, to challenge clichés attached to French banlieues and Brazilian favelas as places devoid of the production and consumption of literary texts. The ‘Dictée des Cités’, a spelling competition promoted since 2013 in French banlieues by writer Rachid Santaki, and the ‘Literary Festival of the Urban Periphery’ (FLUP) curated in Rio de Janeiro since 2012 by writers Julio Ludemir and Écio Salles, are analysed through the lens of Co-Creation as examples of artist-driven initiatives to encourage large local audiences’ engagement with literary texts, transform literary institutions and canons and challenge stereotypes associated with urban peripheries. While the chapter seeks to evaluate the potential of large-scale literary events to change the perception of disadvantaged urban areas, it also explores differences between the Global North and South. The chapter ends with the conclusion that socially engaged arts festivals and Co-Creation events may promote similar aims, they however differ in their scale, approaches to knowledge production as well as in their strategies promoting engagement with creative methods.
Capturing the impact of Co-Creation: poetry and street art in Iztapalapa
Authors: Davies Joanne , Osorio-Saez Eliana , Sandoval-Hernández Andrés , Horvath Christina
Published: May 2021

This chapter seeks to test through a case study how transformative change resulting from Co-Creation can be evidenced and measured using a quasi experimental mixed-method approach. The first section focuses on the design of the case study, a poetry workshop aimed at students aged 14–17, initiated at a secondary school in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, by a group of researchers in collaboration with four poets, a street artist, a governmental organization belonging to the Mexican Ministry of Culture, the teachers and non-academic staff from a lower secondary school. The second section explains the design of the research methods and analyses changes in how workshop participants perceive their neighbourhood and themselves as agents of change in their school and wider community. The final section assesses the effectiveness of the both the Co-Creation workshop and the methodology used to measure its impact. Our final comments suggest that to be more efficient, the evaluation of Co-Creation workshops need to focus on both the intangible (knowledge, understanding, emotions) and the creative (poetry, painting) outcomes in ways that combine research methods from the North with strategies inspired by the epistemologies of the South.
Conclusion: lessons, implications and recommendations
Authors: Horvath Christina , Carpenter Juliet
Published: May 2021

The conclusion reflects on the different approaches that researchers, activists, practitioners and artists from the Global North and South have developed to Co-Creation. It identifies key themes emerging from to previous chapters’ contributions to conceptualisation of Co-Creation in theory and practice. These include the approach’s core objectives, relations to power holders and the state, the management of power relations within Co-Creation, the different roles and positionalities participants can take, the different processes of knowledge production and their tangible and intangible outcomes, space and place that enable Co-Creative processes and are produced by them, the methodology’s impact on communities and the challenges to evaluate and measure it and contexts in which Co-Creation can be an effective method. The authors highlight new, emerging directions for further investigation, which could include exploration of different positionalities and their impact on Co-Creation processes, and qualitative evaluation of the impacts taking into account the methods developed by the epistemologies of the South. The chapter ends with a series of practical recommendations for activists, researchers, artists, and practitioners interested in pursuing Co-Creation initiatives.
Definitions and typologies of police corruption
Authors: Singh Danny
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the pre-existing definitions of what corruption entails starting from the abuse of public office for private authority to forms of political and divisional advantage. Definitions of police corruption follow to analyse a variety of activities that qualify as police malfeasance related to famously cited criminological literature concerning typologies. The typologies list the activities that range from corruption of authority, kickbacks and finally planting of evidence (that includes drugs). Integrity violations are then examined to cover a broader range of police malpractices such as moonlighting and criminal activity in private time. Moreover, the debate of bending rules which includes the use of the ‘magic pencil’, perjury or excessive means of coercion for a noble and/or justified outcome as part of departmental advantage is reached.
Young people’s civic engagement and political participation
Authors: Power Sally
Published: May 2021

In this chapter, Sally Power looks at school students’ engagement in civil society – an issue about which very little is known. Drawing on survey data with 1000 14-year-olds in Wales, this chapter challenges the largely negative media portrayals of young people as being selfishly- rather than civically-minded. Levels of associational membership among these young people are high, and levels of charitable activity and volunteering are extraordinarily high – engaged in by the overwhelming majority of young people and far more frequently than by older people. However, the data also indicate that young people are very ambivalent about the value of these activities which must raise issues about future levels of civil and political participation.
Leaving a legacy for civil society
Authors: Powell Rhian
Published: May 2021

In this chapter, Rhian Powell examines the perspectives and priorities of older people when thinking about the legacy they will leave after their death. She draws on semi-structured interviews with twenty-two people willing to discuss whether or not they intend to leave a legacy gift to charity in their will. The research shows that decisions to leave a charitable bequest are complex and require the donor to balance a number of potentially competing obligations – particularly between the family, civil society and the state. When participants think about their inheritance, considerations about these competing institutions are strongly connected and consequently how participants think about one will affect their views on the others. For this reason, it is impossible to only discuss participants’ attitudes towards civil society without also considering their attitudes towards family and the state.
Semantic, institutional and spatio-temporal fixes
Authors: Jessop Bob
Published: May 2021

Claus Offe notes that, since every mode of state policy-making is prone to failure, either a stable state is impossible or can only exist where the state can flexibly shift modes of policy-making as the failures of prevailing policy-making threaten its rationality and legitimacy. This depends on the strategic capacities to sustain exchange, negotiation, hierarchy, or solidarity as well as the specific nature of the coordination problems. Whilst increasing functional differentiation makes hierarchical coordination increasingly problematic, the structural and strategic conditions for effective governance may not be developed enough to outperform continued reliance on hierarchy or neo-liberal preferences for marketized solutions. We must examine the self-reflexive, self-diagnosing, and self-modifying capacities of governing agents and their institutional capacities to redesign themselves in response to failures. Effective governance and metagovernance depend on requisite complexity, requisite reflexivity, and requisite irony.
Competitiveness vs civil society as modes of governance
Authors: Jessop Bob
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores ‘competitiveness’ as an important object of governance. It asks how competition is integrated into state projects and practices and what are the discursive and material dimensions of competition considered as a social construct and social constraint. It examines the representations of competition in liberalism and neo-liberalism in terms of economic, political, and ideological imaginaries and the limits to their reproduction in terms of the complexities of capitalist social relations. It then explores the complexities of competition and their role in differential accumulation. It considers competition law and the competition state as efforts to steer competition. It identifies limits to competition relative to other modes of governance and ‘metagovernance’ as a response to these limits. Finally, it shows how the fetishization of competition subsumes society under the logic of capitalism.
Animate, attune, amplify
Authors: Batsleer Janet , Duggan James
Published: May 2021

This chapter defines loneliness and explains the approach of the research. The project was committed to investigating loneliness beyond individualising and psychological accounts. Instead there was a commitment to engage with the social conditions of loneliness, such as poverty, inequality and precarity which shape youth experience. Youth work practices and partnership working were crucial to developing safe and productive research relationships with the youth co-researchers throughout the project. Loneliness is something that cuts through and across young people’s lives and so the study of it requires a transdisciplinary dialogue, bringing together insights from diverse fields to understand youth loneliness where lonely young people are not just lonely nor are they merely young. The chapter concludes with an outline of book’s structure.
Finding oneself a loneliness agenda
Authors: Batsleer Janet , Duggan James
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the policy, practice and media contexts surrounding the emergence of the youth loneliness agenda. To understand the social conditions of loneliness it is necessary to locate youth loneliness in the neoliberalising policy context, and the intersections between neoliberalism and the individualising tendencies of psychological research and loneliness interventions. Finally, the chapter questions the representation of youth loneliness, especially how loneliness emerges and spreads, through notions of contagion and crisis.
Loneliness and poverty
Authors: Batsleer Janet , Duggan James
Published: May 2021

Poverty intensifies loneliness. The impact that lack of money has on the ability to take part in small celebrations and get-togethers that others take for granted intensifies loneliness. The inability to join in and a failure to be able to provide for oneself at a time when young people are meant to be learning to ‘stand on their own two feet’ is accompanied by a strong sense of shame. Poverty is associated with physical isolation in ‘uncared for places’. There can be an association between the shame of poverty and a cycle of mental ill-health and drug use/abuse which intensifies isolation. The concept of ‘social abjection’ is introduced as a means to understand the loneliness associated with poverty.
Creativity and solidarity as method: the example of Missing and other stories
Authors: Batsleer Janet , Duggan James
Published: May 2021

This chapter draws together the findings of the research through an analysis of the creative and collaborative methods which were used throughout the Loneliness Connects Us research project. The partnership between academic (including feminist) research, youth work and creative arts practice produced situated knowledges critical to the success of this project. The immersive theatre performance ‘Missing’ is presented in detail in this chapter, to show how collaboration and creativity were harnessed before during and after the performances. Shared interests and creativity; solitude, creativity and solidarity; relationality, friendship and solidarity, and their part in practices of both collaborative research creation and socio-cultural animation are explored.
The paradoxical positioning of the family and civil society
Authors: Muddiman Esther , Power Sally , Taylor Chris
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses the paradoxical positioning of the family and civil society. This paradox arises from the ways in which civil society is variously defined through a series of binary oppositions — in relation to each of which the family sits uneasily. The chapter begins by outlining how the 'family' has traditionally been conceptualised in relation to civil society. These representations are not only contradictory, but also based on value-laden representations of both the family and civil society that are ideologically rather than empirically underpinned. In general, within much of the academic literature, there has been a tendency to uphold the virtues of the 'public sphere' against the self-interestedness of the 'private sphere.' The chapter concludes by arguing for the importance of empirical rather than just theoretical research on the interface between the 'public' and the 'private'.
Reframing civil society and the family
Authors: Muddiman Esther , Power Sally , Taylor Chris
Published: May 2021

This chapter draws together the insights that this book offers into the relationship between the family and civil society, underscoring the methodological and theoretical implications of this empirical work. The book argues that the role of the family in civil society has been largely overlooked in the social sciences, with the two domains often being presented as completely separate and, in some cases, as oppositional to one another. The goal is to empirically investigate the extent to which family relationships and connections can help in understanding civic and political engagement. The chapter then revisits the initial research questions outlined in the first chapter and reflects on how the book has contributed to knowledge on intergenerational relations, the domestic division of labour, and the public–private binary in relation to civil society engagement. It also identifies remaining gaps in the understanding of this area, and sketches out some future directions in this field.
Introduction
Authors: Križ Katrin
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter presents the argument and goal of the book, which is to show in what ways child protection caseworkers employed by public child protection agencies in Norway and the United States (California) can create citizens by promoting the participation of children and young people in their everyday practice. Public child protection agencies are only one part of the citizenship piece, but they are a salient one in the lives of children and young people who encounter them. Child protection caseworkers, the 'street-level bureaucrats' working in public child protection agencies, make very important decisions about children and young people's lives and provide children, youth, and families with pertinent services. Children and youth must be able to participate in administrative decisions, according to the international standards set by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Street-level bureaucrats like child protection caseworkers have the power to create the conditions for children's and young people's participation. They can thus shape children and young people's opportunities to act as citizens.
Participation triggers
Authors: Križ Katrin
Published: May 2021

This chapter assesses the case conditions that lead a child protection caseworker to take children's statements, opinions, and wishes seriously. The study participants from both Norway and the United States talked about situations involving collaboration between children and workers and child-led participation when they described the case scenarios where children's opinions counted. There were several common themes. Children's age mattered to the extent to which workers took their opinion seriously: most study participants described case examples that involved pre-teens and teens. Case context also mattered: more than one third of the participants described situations that involved a child who wanted to be removed from their home, and the workers then ended up supporting the child's wish. In many of these cases, the child's expression of their experience or opinion was one piece of the evidence that workers were considering in the case.
Protecting children, creating citizens
Authors: Križ Katrin
Published: May 2021

This chapter highlights the participatory approaches that exist in child protection practice. Citizens are people who actively participate in decisions about their lives and the communities in which they live. If child protection caseworkers promote children's participation in these decisions, they also play a role in promoting their status as citizens. Of course, children's interactions with other children and young people and other adults may contribute to children's and young people's status as citizens as well. The participation of children in child protection-related decisions is only one 'building block' of a larger historical trajectory towards children's citizenship and children's rights. Nonetheless, it is worthy of exploration because abused and neglected children are in an especially vulnerable position.
‘Old enemies of peace’: constituents of organised money
Authors: Pearson Gordon
Published: May 2021

Roosevelt introduced New Deal 2 outlining constituents of organised money, adding that government by them was ‘just as dangerous as Government by organised mob’. This chapter updates the components of organised money, by which we are now ruled, noting the emergence of predatory finance, adding the financialised business, and the increasingly dominant role of Big Tech, and the complicit supportive strands of academia, the media and political sectors, all of which serve to develop and promote neoclassical belief and all gain from its application, at the expense of every other interest.
Measures of real progression
Authors: Pearson Gordon
Published: May 2021

Measuring progression without destruction relates specifically to the items identified in the previous chapter. Orthodox measures of economic progression still focus primarily on measures such as GDP and its growth, but GDP is itself full of flaws and anomalies, as well as being too easily fixable by relevant political-economic decision makers. Sustainable development goals which include reducing inequalities within and between member states have been identified and agreed by the United Nations, but their effectiveness is yet to be demonstrated. Further measures are identified including democratic protection and renewal which seem currently threatened in Anglo-America, the restraint of organised money and displacement of neoclassical belief. Tentative signs of such progression are noted, but they are yet to be confirmed.
Practitioner notes on real organisational systems
Authors: Pearson Gordon
Published: May 2021

These Notes start and end with acknowledgement of the reality of human interdependence. They relate to practitioner experience in the real economy in manufacturing, retail and distribution, and in academia, as well as practitioner experience of the financial economy, both as recipient of predatory activity and as a customer for financial “expertise” re acquisition and merger activity. Real economy roles include training, general management, strategic management and planning, human resource management, finance and accounting with responsibilities for merger and acquisition activity and business school teaching in the areas of strategic management and business ethics. Practitioner Notes provide the basis of the knowledge and understanding of how such real economy organisational systems work, whether private for-profit or public sector, and therefore how they might most effectively be coordinated and focused to contribute to progression without destruction.
Values, attitudes, behaviour
Authors: Rees Stuart
Published: May 2021

This chapter identifies the social, religious, political, economic, and cultural forces which facilitate cruelties. It reveals patterns of values, attitudes, and behaviour, beginning with the age-old stigmatizing of victims. Such negative labelling is implemented in policies of national inclusiveness: whom to regard as normal and worthy, as compared to policies of exclusiveness which designate whom to see as abnormal and unworthy. Even where notorious killers and torturers could be identified, the moral and cultural contexts of their acts require an examination, which includes cruelty to animals and violence to the environment. The chapter also looks at the evils of violent cultures, such as the security politics of Israel, Iran's authoritarian theocracy, America's love of imprisonment, and entrenched discrimination in the Indian caste system.
Cruel or compassionate world?
Authors: Rees Stuart
Published: May 2021

This chapter highlights the need to recover respect for human rights, for humanitarian law, and for the ideals written into the UN Charter. Those who craft policies could support areas of public life which either have not appeared on their radar or have not been perceived as having anything to do with cruelty. To that end, priority tasks in education for humanity concern issues which have been given insufficient emphasis. These issues include the erosion of human rights principles; reminders about the ways in which free market economic policies enable corporations to contribute to poverty and to cruelty to children; evidence of the increase in cruelty to animals; and the cruelties associated with the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons. The chapter underlines the responsibilities of teachers, in schools, in colleges, and universities, plus journalists of every description, to educate about rebuilding civil societies through advocacy of human rights, including protection of a precious planet, and by supporting public institutions and services.
Restorative Justice for Survivors of Sexual Abuse
Authors: Marinari Angela
Published: May 2021

This book explores survivors’ experiences of sexual abuse, and their reflections on the sense of justice they feel, in order to inform the design of a programme of restorative justice services. By asking – does it have to be with the abuser? - this empirical research examines whether survivors of sexual abuse may wish to have a restorative justice process with those who cause them harm, other than their abusers – that is, with those who enable their abuse or the impact of it. This is an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), and extensive quotes from survivors are presented within the text. Three theoretical insights are reported: the complex, triangulated relationships of sexual abuse; the need for the act and the impact of abuse to be recognised and validated by others; and the role of narrative in survivors’ journey towards justice and healing, and how these are strengthened or challenged through the cycle of narrative development. Through an analytical commentary, these insights show how restorative justice processes with enablers of abuse may benefit survivors, as well as providing general information about sexual abuse, and combine to present the pyramid programme of restorative justice for survivors of sexual abuse. Best practice guidelines for the implementation of the programme are included. The book concludes by exploring what these radical propositions may mean for survivors, practitioners, and academics.
Building a restorative justice programme
Authors: Marinari Angela
Published: May 2021

This chapter builds a restorative justice programme for survivors of sexual abuse by weaving the key insights from this study with the existing academic literature, to form an analytic commentary which develops new knowledge. Through this discussion, the justifications and potential outcomes of restorative justice processes with enablers of abuse are explored, along with the role they may play in enhancing the recognition felt by survivors. Methods for assisting survivors to gain control over their narratives are proposed, as well as the use of this concept as a measure of success. These constructions lead to the presentation of the pyramid programme for survivors of sexual abuse, widening their justice options.
Best Practice Guidelines
Authors: Marinari Angela
Published: May 2021

Theory is translated into practice in this chapter, by drawing on the cumulative knowledge built through this research to present the author’s reflections on the principles needed to implement the pyramid programme of restorative justice for survivors of sexual abuse in as safe and as ethical a manner as possible. Proposed content for the first stage – providing general information about sexual abuse to survivors – is accompanied by considerations of the practical and legal implications of conducting restorative justice processes with enablers of abuse. The benefits of collaboration between practitioners and academics are also reinforced.
Westminster and the World
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: May 2021

This book considers what Britain might learn from Westminster-derived constitutions around the world. The book begins by identifying the deep constitutional crisis of the British body-politic and attempts to introduce a remedy in the form of new constitutional settlement founded upon a written constitution. It explains that the 'unwritten constitution', which grew up over the centuries from a hotchpotch of statutes, judicial decisions, disputed conventions, and traditions has reached the end of its useful life. The book emphasizes the revival of the British democracy through a written constitution, a supreme and fundamental law that is founded upon a broad political and societal consensus. It reviews constitutional proposals that reflect the 'Charter 88 agenda', which has motivated constitutional reformers in Britain for the last three decades. The book traces the decline and fall of the British constitution over the space of 80 years. It describes Britain's current constitutional crisis as the final unravelling of what might be termed the 'Hanoverian constitutional settlement'. It then makes a case for a new written constitution. It emphasizes how a written constitution does not need to be contained in one document but must have a bounded set of such laws that are distinguished from other laws and whose status as the supreme and fundamental law is known, declared and explicit. Exploring the principles of Westminster Model constitutions and their impact on democracy, human rights and good government, the book builds to a bold re-imagining of the United Kingdom's future written framework.
Rediscovering Britain’s Wider Constitutional Tradition
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: May 2021

This chapter attempts to identify the deep constitutional crisis of the British body-politic and introduce a remedy in the form of new constitutional settlement founded upon a written constitution. It explains the 'unwritten constitution', which grew up over the centuries from a hotchpotch of statutes, judicial decisions, disputed conventions, and half-remembered traditions has reached the end of its useful life. It also emphasizes the revival of the British democracy through a written constitution, a supreme and fundamental law that is founded upon a broad political and societal consensus. The chapter reviews constitutional proposals that reflect the 'Charter 88 agenda', which has motivated constitutional reformers in Britain for the last three decades. It responds to the new constitutional crisis that was unanticipated by the reformers of the pre-1997 era.
The Decline and Fall of the British Constitution
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: May 2021

This chapter diagnoses Britain's constitutional crisis and sets it in historical context. It traces the decline and fall of the British constitution over the space of 80 years, from its Churchillian triumph, through new challenges it could not meet and reforms that were not equal to the task, to its current Johnsonian catastrophe. It also describes Britain's current constitutional crisis as the final unravelling of what might be termed the 'Hanoverian constitutional settlement'. The chapter mentions the Hanoverian monarchs who kept the system of constitutional settlement until it defined the constitutional order in which British democracy grew and flourished several decades later. It explains the constitutional nature of the Hanoverian constitutional settlement as it represented a strategic agreement between all then-relevant institutional, political, and social groups.
The Crown, Prime Minister and Government
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews the earliest Westminster Model constitutions that took unambiguously monarchical forms, namely those of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. It talks about the power that was vested in the Crown, which was an integral part of the legislature even in the post-war era. It also mentions former colonies that became independent from the British Empire and did not cease to be part of 'Her Majesty's dominions' as they continued as Commonwealth realms with the functions of the Head of State being performed by a Governor-General nominally appointed by the Queen. The chapter explains how Ireland and Burma retained Westminster Model constitutions in republican guise, with a ceremonial figurehead president that take over the functions that would normally be performed by a Governor-General. It identifies Bangladesh, Dominica, India, Ireland, Malta, Samoa, and Trinidad & Tobago as current examples of Westminster Model republics.
Nations, Regions and Local Democracy
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: May 2021

This chapter talks about Sir Ivor Jennings, who observed in the context of decolonization in the 1950s that one must first decide who are the people before one can decide how the people are to govern themselves. It proposes a constitutional renewal project that must recognize the United Kingdom as a complex 'Union state' made up of distinct nations. It also describes the United Kingdom as a messy amalgam of two kingdoms, a principality, and a dismembered province that were forged together by civil wars, bribery, and dynastic wrangling. The chapter looks at the geographical, cultural, historical, and demographic complexity of the polity being constituted that will determine much of its constitutional architecture even when fairly standard Westminster Model constitutionalism is applied. It illustrates India and Bangladesh, two countries whose constitutions are thoroughly Westminster influenced but show different design because of the demands of context.
Constitution-Building Processes
Authors: Bulmer W. Elliot
Published: May 2021

This chapter covers the processes and politics of constitutional refoundation and analyzes reflections on the need for a broader revival of civic and democratic values beyond the constitution. It draws on the experiences of other Westminster Model and Commonwealth democracies to consider how a new constitution for the United Kingdom might be adopted. It also examines what the process of constitution building might look like and what institutions should be responsible for negotiating and drafting the constitution. The chapter elaborates how the participants of policy making should be chosen, the process of final adoption of the agreed draft, and the scope at different stages of the process for both political consensus and public engagement. It claims that participants in a constitution-building process may be motivated by reason, interest, and passion in order to pursue their goals through a mixture of arguing and bargaining.
Introduction
Authors: Scandrett Eurig
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on public sociology that demonstrates affinities with radical education practice and debates in the dialogue between public sociology and radical education at the edges of academia. It refers to a methodology developed and popularised by public sociologist Michael Burawoy, which facilitates the critical dialogue between practitioners of public sociology and education. It also discusses the constitution of 'publics', production of sociological knowledge, and different contexts of pedagogical practice. The chapter explains how the dialogue is central to the practices of public sociology education and the dialogical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, whose influence is fundamental to diverse forms of radical education. It describes the value of the knowledge that the poor bring to the educational context and challenges the oppression that kept them in poverty.
Class, Gender and Identity: Axes of Structure and Difference in Subaltern Counterpublics
Authors: Scandrett Eurig
Published: May 2021

This chapter identifies who are the 'publics' of public sociology education by referring to Nancy Fraser's formulation of the subaltern counterpublic. It explores who constitutes a 'subaltern counterpublic' and produces curricula in public sociology education. It also mentions who is included and excluded by the practice of public sociology education. The chapter analyses the provocation that makes the case that public sociology primarily engages with subaltern counterpublics, such as those engaged in resistance, resilience, or building alternatives to some form of oppression, exploitation, or injustice. It explains what constitutes a 'counter public' that emerges, for the public sociologist, from dialogue with the praxis of those engaged in struggle against structures and representations that oppress, exploit, and exclude.
Gentrification and the Making of Craft Beer White Spaces
Authors: Chapman Nathaniel G. , Brunsma David L.
Published: May 2021

This chapter evaluates the ways in which craft beer has reshaped spaces, places, and cultures in the image of white people, whiteness, and white supremacy. Craft beer spaces and places are typically located in gentrified areas, which have become signifiers of gentrification and middle-class consumption. The chapter then argues that craft breweries socially and culturally construct authentic identities that reflect middle-class values. It also explores the ways in which gentrification and craft beer are entangled, and the processes whereby such beer gentrification leads to the creation of 'white spaces.' Using interview data, the chapter examines how these spaces discourage and exclude black people and other minorities from participating in craft beer cultures, and therefore its consumption.
Introduction: Sharing Milk
Authors: Carter Shannon K. , Reyes-Foster Beatriz M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter provides original sociological thinking in order to bear on contemporary gender relations, divisions, and issues of concern to feminists. It analyzes human milk-sharing communities in a large metropolitan area in southeastern United States. It also describes the practices of milk-sharing, the meanings ascribed to human milk, and the labour involved in its production. The chapter builds on existing scholarship and theoretical frameworks to develop a model for understanding contemporary forms of bodily sharing. It explains how feeding of human milk to socially and biologically unrelated infants is a normal method of infant feeding documented throughout human history and in societies around the world.
Theorizing Milk Sharing
Authors: Carter Shannon K. , Reyes-Foster Beatriz M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter highlights the ways in which milk-sharing encompasses an array of embodied and social practices through the experiences of a single mother named Anna. It explores how milk itself has an important material presence in Anna's story as she describes the ways she transports, stores, and handles it, alongside the deep emotional connection she experiences with it. It also shows human milk-sharing as a community practice and material that form a theoretical groundwork on various aspects of milk-sharing. The chapter references Étienne Wenger's communities of practice model to propose the notion of bio-communities of practice, which are characterized by bio-intimacy. It explains how bio-intimacy is interconnected with the materiality of human milk, particularly as an emotionally laden substance.
Conclusion: A Social Theory of Transnational Criminal Markets
Authors: Mackenzie Simon
Published: May 2021

This chapter begins by recounting common themes across global trafficking markets, and considering the evidence for links and overlaps between them, using three parameters: geographical; transit; and exchange of one trafficked commodity for another. Then we revisit the spectrum of enterprise concept that has been a central thread of analysis of each trafficking market throughout the book. Trafficking is discussed as a form of illicit commodification, as objects and people are transformed into things that can be bought and sold. Commodification is a central feature of contemporary market society, and it encourages an objectification of the things and people being trafficked, which come to be seen merely as items that can be exploited by business-minded entrepreneurs willing to break the law. Through these processes of commodification and exploitation, trafficking is seen as a systematic feature of globalised neoliberal economy and society. The illegal part of the spectrum of enterprise turns a mirror on modern society and economy that highlights some of the worst features of capitalist life: including a business orientation that is systematically indifferent to harmful effects.
Women's Activism Behind the Screens
Authors: Galt Frances
Published: May 2021

This book contributes to important discussions on gender inequality in the present-day film and television industries and labour movement through an historical analysis of women workers and their trade union in the British film and television industries from 1933 to 2017. This book concentrates on the three iterations of the technicians’ union: the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT) (1933-56), the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) (1957-91), and the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union (BECTU) (1991-2017). Drawing on previously unseen archival material and oral history interviews with activists, it casts new light on women’s experiences of union participation and feminism over nine decades. This book advances three key arguments in relation to its central themes: the operation of a gendered union structure, women’s activism, and the relationship between class and gender in the labour movement. Firstly, it argues that a gendered union structure was institutionalised from the union’s establishment and maintained through a belief system that women’s issues were not trade union issues. Secondly, it argues that separate self-organisation was essential to women’s activity within the gendered union structure as it provided an essential space and voice for women to discuss their gender-specific concerns, develop consciousness and skills and formulate policy. It further emphasises the importance of external feminist allies to women’s union activity. Thirdly, it argues that class differences between middle-class women in film and television production and working-class women in the laboratories informed the direction of women’s activity at its height during the 1970s and 1980s.
Catalysts for Change, 1960–75
Authors: Galt Frances C.
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses the relationship between women and the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) between 1960 and 1975 to identify the catalysts for the establishment of the Committee on Equality (COE) in 1973 and the demand for an investigation into gender discrimination in the film and television industries, which culminated in the publication of the Patterns of Discrimination Against Women in the Film and Television Industries report in 1975. Firstly, this chapter considers whether the ‘roots’ of women’s militancy evident in the labour movement during the 1960s (Boston, 2015) can be identified within the ACTT between 1960 and 1968. Secondly, this chapter argues that the emergence of the New Left and women’s liberation movement and industrial militancy in Britain between 1968 and 1973 encouraged women to challenge the gendered union structure of the ACTT. This section particularly highlights the significance of the London Women’s Film Group to women’s activity within the ACTT. Finally, this chapter investigates the activity of the COE between 1973 and 1975, considering: the demands advanced by women activists at the ACTT’s 1973 Annual Conference, the logistics of the investigation, the obstacles to women’s activity, and the function of women’s separate self-organisation.
It's the Government, Stupid!
Authors: Dowding Keith
Published: May 2021

Governments increasingly blame citizens for their own failed policies. Individuals can only be held responsible for the choices they reasonably make from the opportunities they have available to them. Government is the major agent in society that creates those opportunities for citizens. We know a good deal about how regulations and institutions affect social outcomes in various policy areas. This book examines five policy areas across the USA, UK and Australia: gun ownership, food manufacture, housing, gambling and recreational drugs. It demonstrates how different regulations affect gun crime, and how modern food manufacturers design their products to tap into basic human biological desires, creating the obesity crisis. Government policy over the last fifty years has produced a severe housing crisis. Gambling is an area where government has relaxed regulation to the benefit of many, but the detriment of the few, and needs to grapple with problems it has created, while recreational drugs is an area where government has remained paternalistic, performing the nanny role it refuses in other areas, despite the obvious failures of its regulatory stance. The book shows how government blames its citizens for the problems which arise from the government’s own policies. It’s the government’s responsibility, stupid.
Obesity
Authors: Dowding Keith
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses the nature of obesity and body shape generally, and how they affect health. Looking at the USA, UK and Australia in particular, it suggests that there is indeed a growing obesity and health crisis in the western world. It finds the causes of this crisis in modern food manufacture as it has developed from the 1960s onwards, notably sugar, trans-fats and other additives in food. It argues that whilst people do have some responsibility for their choice of food and drink, they cannot be blamed for the obesity crisis. This is the fault of governments that allow food manufacturers to produce foods that we know, given our body chemistry and biology, appeal to us and will provide excess calories with low nutritional value. People can only be expected to reasonably choose from the menu available to them, and that menu is poor-quality food, illustrated most dramatically in the food deserts of the USA. The obesity crisis is a failure of government regulation.
Problem Gambling
Authors: Dowding Keith
Published: May 2021

In the past government pursued a moralistic and paternalistic policy with regard to gambling. However, in many countries, governments have relaxed regulations, whilst not treating gambling quite like other goods. This relaxation of regulations benefits many people who like to gamble, but has led to a growing issue of problem gamblers and addicts: gambling harms not only their welfare, but also that of their families. This chapter examines the issue of problem gambling, and how the gambling industry both exploits and also tries to help them. It argues that whilst government has recognized problem gambling, it could focus regulation more directly, given our knowledge of how people become addicted and what sort of gambling machines cause the greatest problems. Using Norway as a case study, the chapter demonstrates how specific regulations can have a big effect.
Recreational Drugs Policy
Authors: Dowding Keith
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the history of regulating recreational drugs in the USA, UK and Australia. It shows that the criminalization of recreational drugs is a relatively recent phenomenon, based not on citizen welfare but on fears that drugs affect the nation’s ability to wage war, whilst some early legislation was openly racist. It argues that the continued justification of drug criminalization is moralistic and has racist underpinnings. It suggests that whilst the social problems of recreational drug use are serious, they are no more serious than those of alcohol or gambling, and legalization has many advantages over continued criminalization. It examines the results of drug decriminalization in Portugal, and the likely practicality and social effects should recreational drugs be legalized. It argues that such legalization would also require careful regulation, much as we have for drugs manufactured for medical purposes. It compares the policy stance of governments on recreational drugs to that on the other issues discussed in this book.