bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Understanding migrant students’ transitions to upper secondary education: devalued capitals and nonstandard timeframes
Authors: Manzano Martí , Tarabini Aina
Published: May 2023

The aim of this chapter is to identify the factors that affect transitions to upper secondary education among students with migrant backgrounds. Based on an adaptation of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and a mixed methodology that combines students’ questionnaires and interviews in Barcelona, the chapter demonstrates the overwhelmingly disadvantaged conditions that migrant students deal with in their upper secondary educational transitions. Results suggest three main interrelated factors: a devaluation of family capital as a result of the migration process; a lack of legitimised linguistic capital that affects students’ grades in lower secondary education and teaching recommendations; and a misalignment between the standard timeframes of schooling and the timeframes of migrant trajectories, which reduces the chances that migrant students choose the academic track. The chapter demonstrates the usefulness of applying Bourdieu’s analytical tools to better understand the role of migration in the making of educational transitions.
Choosing against gender: making sense of girls’ and boys’ upper secondary vocational education choices
Authors: Curran Marta , Tarabini Aina
Published: May 2023

The aim of this chapter is to explore how gender dispositions are mobilised in upper secondary educational transitions and specifically in the making of counter-hegemonic choices in Vocational Education and Training (VET). Based on interviews with girls and boys studying atypical gender VET modalities in Barcelona, the chapter demonstrates remarkable differences between boys and girls in their educational trajectories and in their motivations to choose a non-normative VET programme. While most of the boys were developing lads’ attitudes during their school trajectory, whilst laddettes attitudes were much rarer. Most of the boys explain their non-normative gender choices by alluding to instrumental factors while girls’ choices are mostly expressed in terms of ‘personality’. Furthermore, ‘choosing against gender’ is more traumatic for girls as they are more pressured than their male peers. Overall, the chapter contributes to understanding the relationship between gender, educational transitions and social inequalities.
Facilitation
Authors: Gal John , Weiss-Gal Idit
Published: May 2023

Research on social workers’ policy engagement shows that one of the most important factors linked to their policy role is the support that they get from their workplace. Thus, social workers’ engagement in policy will be facilitated if the dominant values and modes of practice in their immediate work environment, that is, ‘the organizational culture’, allow or encourage them to engage in this type of practice and provide them with the resources, facilities and support necessary to do so. Here, we draw on theoretical knowledge on organisations and on the findings of studies on the facilitating role of organisations in the policy engagement of social workers in order to identify the conditions under which social workers in organisations engage in policymaking and the factors that impact the form that this will take. The chapter explores these themes with regard to social workers in advocacy organisations, service providers and governmental services, particularly those on the local level.
The Pursuit of Possibility
Authors: Thrift Nigel
Published: May 2023

This book makes an argument for the existential importance of the research university in a world beset by climate change and general short-termism. It is in three parts. The first part provides a description of what the research university consists of – buildings and spaces, academics and students, research and teaching. I argue that the motive force of research universities is unlearning. The second part provides a summary of the changes that have occurred in British higher education since the 1990s with special attention paid to research universities. The final part suggests policies that could help to assure the excellence of research universities and also provide a lifeline for a planet that is being attacked on all sides.
So what is a research university?
Authors: Thrift Nigel
Published: May 2023

This chapter provides a core definition of the research university based on the concept of four particular duties. It then turns to the question of excellence. Do recent developments in research promote more excellent research or not. This is a pressing question since excellent research will be one of the planet’s only lifelines as climate change bites. Four issues are examined: over-publication, research culture, discovery research and levelling up
The impact and effect of COVID-19 on BAME-led voluntary sector organisations: resilience and new ways of working
Authors: Murray Karl
Published: May 2023

One year on, the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities has come into sharp focus with major implications for BAME-led voluntary and community social enterprises (VCSEs). Research and rapid reviews have highlighted concerns about the impact the pandemic was having on the sustainability of BAME-led VSOs, the majority of which were micro and small organisations. This chapter draws on research conducted for The Ubele Initiative (Ubele). The findings show that nine out of ten (87 per cent) micro and small BAME-led organisations, serving over 20,000 clients each week across the UK, were at risk of permanently closing within three months. This chapter seeks to examine the impacts and effects of COVID-19 on the BAME-led voluntary sector in the UK during the first year of the pandemic.
Voluntary sector organisations, older people and healthy ageing during the COVID-19 pandemic
Authors: Dayson Chris , Bimpson Emma , Paine Angela Ellis , Chambers Joseph , Gilbertson Jan , Kara Helen
Published: May 2023

‘Healthy ageing’ is described by the WHO as ‘the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables wellbeing in older age’. Voluntary sector organisations (VSOs) have been at the forefront of healthy ageing for many years but the COVID-19 pandemic has presented a major challenge. This chapter draws on a case study of the Leeds Neighbourhood Networks (LNNs) to explore these challenges and their implications. The LNNs are independent voluntary organisations that aim to support older people to remain living independently and to participate in their communities through a range of activities and services provided at a neighbourhood level. During lockdown, the requirement that vulnerable older people ‘shield’ from human contact necessitated a focus on meeting needs while other aspects of healthy ageing took a back seat. As the pandemic evolved, the LNNs brought other elements of healthy ageing back by finding innovative ways to maintain relationships with and between their members and supporting them to stay active and mobile. Moving forward, the experience and learning from the pandemic will have a profound effect on how LNNs and other similar organisations support healthy ageing in a post-COVID world.
How many of us had pandemic in our risk register? A snapshot of experiences of community buildings during the first lockdown of 2020
Authors: Hindley Ann , Wilson John
Published: May 2023

Community buildings have played a significant role in the voluntary sector for many years. The focus of this chapter is on the response of community buildings and spaces to the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown as well as the impact the pandemic has had on them, in particular, their role in relation to individual and community wellbeing and the issues faced by the largely voluntary managers of these organisations. This mixed methods research included semi-structured interviews and an online survey to capture data about the organisations, their responses and their current position in respect of finances, volunteers, trustees and planning for the future. The findings revealed a differential response to the crisis from complete closure to becoming a community hub to deliver local services, with a range of imaginative interventions in between. Managers have been struggling with shifting and contradictory guidance and face issues of losing bookings to virtual meetings and older volunteers nervous to return. Despite these challenges, most community buildings have confidence in their future and their ability to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19, housing and home
Authors: Tunstall Becky
Published: May 2023

This chapter introduces the book. Everyone on earth has views about the COVID-19 pandemic. It was unprecedented and multi-dimensional. It has been seen as a test of resilience, as casting a spotlight on inequality, and potentially as a turning point for policy and society. The most important policy used to control COVID-19 infection in the UK – and all around the world – was ‘lockdown’, requiring large proportions of the population to stay home. This resulted in mass changes in the way in which homes were used, experienced and paid for, with their own knock-on inequalities. When the pandemic hit, many felt that the UK housing system was in ‘crisis’, but suddenly the unsatisfactory system became the official national refuge. The pandemic provided an unfortunate natural opportunity to learn about the UK housing system under unique pressure: its flaws, its inequalities and its resilience. This book uses a wide range of special surveys carried out in 2020–21, including studies of people aged 19, 31, 50, 62 and 74 in 2020 when the pandemic began, to analyse its impact on people, households, homes and the housing system in the UK.
Summary and conclusions
Authors: Tunstall Becky
Published: May 2023

Household and home were central to the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its impact on physical and mental health, living standards and security. UK pandemic policies overlooked the risk of infection at home, which accounted for an estimated 26–39% of deaths. Home size, facilities and costs affected the ability to stay home, and to shield and isolate. Housing inequalities contributed to the marked inequalities in deaths. Household and home size, occupancy, facilities, affordability and cost affected the wider experiences of staying home. Housing tenure and affordability affected the impact of income loss on living standards and risk of repossession. Policies to mitigate pandemic income loss had significant limitations. By early 2022, pre-pandemic inequalities in housing and overcrowding, unaffordability, insecurity and homelessness remained or had worsened, while house price rises continued. Despite the great disruption, and policy innovation including housing homeless people and reducing poverty, in early 2022 things were building back the same, not better. The pandemic highlighted the role of family and friends as supplements to the state and market in providing income, material help, care, support and housing, and as a key source of the overall resilience of the UK.
What Town Planners Do
Authors: Schoneboom Abigail , Slade Jason , Tait Malcolm , Vigar Geoff
Published: May 2023

This book explores the real world of planning practice in England, following planners in their workplaces across four organisations. It pays detailed attention to the environments in which planners work, the dilemmas they face and the ways they navigate an increasingly complex and often contentious planning and development system. The book takes an explicitly ethnographic approach, drawing on extensive fieldwork in two public-sector organisations and two-private sector consultancies. We follow planners working in a local council that has outsourced its planning functions to a private company, as well as a ‘traditional’ local authority which still employs its planners but has embarked on a substantive commercialisation programme. We reveal how commercial imperatives are now integrated into the everyday work of planners, but also demonstrate that longer-running public-service commitments remain. We also explore the working lives of planners in a large multi-disciplinary consultancy working on complex infrastructure and development projects, and look at the work of a smaller, specialist planning consultancy. In doing so we reveal: how different clients are perceived and managed in both public and private sectors; how diverse forms of knowledge are deployed; the role of planners among many others in development processes; and, the pressures of maintaining work-life balance. The book provides a new and sensitive portrayal of the working lives of planners, revealing critical questions about the public interest and professional identity that have resonance with debates about the future of planning in England and elsewhere.
The scope of legitimate action
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: May 2023

Any adequate account of the state should be able to determine what a government is legitimately able to do, and this chapter considers four different views which offer answers to that. Liberalism saw the duty of the state as being to enhance the rights and freedoms of individuals; collective action could be taken by consent. Social democrats use the state as an instrument to make principled change. Communitarian conservatives stress particular duties rather than general rights, working with the grain of the social order. Neoliberals advocate laissez-faire and free markets; the legitimate role of the state is consequently limited.
Afterword
Authors: Patel Pragna
Published: May 2023

Much of my work over the last four decades has grappled with questions that provide the central themes of this book: how do we ensure that the state protects the most vulnerable among us and guarantees their human rights without violating wider human rights and the rule of law itself? The urgent and contemporary challenges we face as feminists are encapsulated in our endeavours to address the role played by the criminal justice system and the state in a context of rising violence against women and girls. In addressing the issue, we are compelled to examine how power, race, class and sex intersect to reproduce inequality and injustice, raising profound questions about how and under what terms we engage as feminists with the state. This dilemma becomes all the more profound when situated in the wider context of an increasingly austerity driven and controlling state that makes progress difficult, threatening to wipe out the feminist gains that have been made by taking away the very tools needed to hold state and non-state power to account....
Race and Racism: Framing the Debate
Authors: Léonard Marie des Neiges
Published: May 2023

Chapter 2 provides some foundational definitions of race and racism according to current sociological approaches. It also offers some important points of reference in terms of the history and significance of the word race in the French context, as well as the use of race and racism as part of the French colonial project. The chapter also introduces the theories that serve as frameworks to examine colorblind racism patterns in France, notably the works of Joe Feagin, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and Jennifer C. Mueller. Finally, this chapter exposes the debates that have taken place among French scholars and political actors over the lack of racial statistics in the census.
Islam and the Republic
Authors: Léonard Marie des Neiges
Published: May 2023

Chapter 6 focuses on the presence of Islam in France, the second largest religion in the country after Catholicism. First it presents the demographics of the Muslim population in France, noting that due to data collection limitations, numbers may misrepresent a more diverse reality. The chapter also offers an analysis of the ongoing issue of the Islamic veil in terms of the racial framing of Islam through the narratives of laϊ‎cité, universalist feminism, and the republican idea of free speech, focusing on the negative consequences against Muslim women in France. Finally, the chapter reviews the legal systems in place in other European countries compared with the French regulations.
Scarcity and Similarity
Authors: Ashley Louise
Published: May 2023

The previous chapter explored how the City encouraged internal and external audiences to believe hiring works as the right people are allocated to the right jobs using qualifications as a neutral form of ‘human capital’. Chapter 4 shows how as higher education expanded during the 1990s, there was a considerable over-supply of suitably qualified candidates for the City’s ‘top jobs’. Having defined talent in narrow terms, City firms struggled to appoint from this small group, contributing to impressions that skills were scarce. In response, firms moved recruitment cycles earlier in students’ academic careers, placing a renewed emphasis on aspirant workers’ ‘social capital’, as these opportunities were more visible and available where networks of friends and family could provide information and advice. Firms also sought to leverage status by appointing high numbers of new entrants from elite universities, whose credentials represent a form of ‘institutional capital’. These exclusionary practices represent a considerable deviation from the merit principle but interactions between firms in the City field meant they became institutionalized and ‘locked-in’.
Status and Stereotypes
Authors: Ashley Louise
Published: May 2023

Chapter 5 continues to explore how in contrast to meritocratic narratives which suggest objectivity and neutrality, hiring managers in the City appoint on the basis of tradition and culturally embedded frameworks instead. While previous chapters have explained a considerable homogeneity in the composition of City elites, this chapter focuses on how and why demographics differ between these jobs. With particular reference to corporate finance and trading in investment banks, it explains how hiring managers appoint and promote on the basis of embodied forms of cultural capital which suggest ‘fit’ and according to stereotypes around who has historically occupied key jobs. While not always efficient from a strictly economic perspective, hiring and promoting on this basis is rational from an alternative perspective, as it helps to compensate for the ambiguity of knowledge in key roles. The chapter ends by suggesting that as expertise and authority continue to be ‘read’ off the social identities of people in ‘top jobs’, this has facilitated a situation in which City leaders have got away with bullshit and bluff.
Diversity and Diffusion
Authors: Ashley Louise
Published: May 2023

Having explained why the City is not fair, Part II of the book turns to why diversity and social mobility agendas implemented in response do not achieve their stated aims. This starts in Chapter 6 by tracing the introduction of the diversity and inclusion agenda (called here ‘diversity’) in the City during the late 1990s and into the 2000s. It argues that diversity’s widespread take-up, and the use of the business case, can be explained less as a result of its proven efficacy in addressing persistent inequalities, and more as a result of diffusion, imitation and corporate fashion. Once again, this suggests a key driver was legitimacy in relation to which the primary challenge posed by evidence of unequal outcomes was how firms could manage associated reputational threats. The chapter shows why the business case is a ‘busted flush’ and explains how diversity has managed pressures toward inclusivity and associated costs, resulting in a largely cosmetic effect. For the most part, this project is not strategically planned, and relies on the work of many City workers, often in quite ‘ordinary’ jobs, who do the work of legitimation on behalf of elites, albeit inadvertently perhaps.
Ridicule and Resistance
Authors: Ashley Louise
Published: May 2023

Chapter 8 explored how organizational social mobility programmes have a limited effect including as young people from working class backgrounds feel stigmatized and indelibly marked. Chapter 9 moves on to consider in further detail how they respond, to underline that while these young people have agency, it is exercised within considerable constraints. Remaining with legitimacy as the central theme of the book, the chapter explores how they experience considerable pressures to conform with dominant norms in order to become ‘legitimate’ City workers. While this is relatively straightforward to those who are closer to this dominant group, others adopt a variety of strategies in response, for example, to comply with these pressures, defy them, or try to compartmentalize or combine competing demands that push them away from an authentic self. The chapter concludes that as they are asked to meet this world on its terms, this can lead to a deeply divided self.
Robots and Immigrants
Authors: Maronitis Kostas , Pencheva Denny
Published: May 2023

Who steals jobs? Who owns jobs?Focusing on the competitive labour market, this book scrutinises the narratives created around immigration and automation. The authors explore how the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and demands for constant flow of immigrant workers eradicate political and working rights, fuelling fears over job theft and ownership.Shedding light on the multiple ways in which employment is used as an instrument of neoliberal governance, this revealing book sparks new debate on the role of automation and migration policies. It is an invaluable resource for academics and practitioners working in the areas of immigration and labour, capitalism and social exclusion, and economic models and political governance.
The Tensions of Algorithmic Thinking
Authors: Beer David
Published: May 2023

Algorithms are everywhere. From the advancing ordering powers exercised through machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to the mundane application of recommendation systems and news-feed filtering, and onto the vast and automated storage, analysis, sorting, retrieval and circulation of data. Algorithmic ways of seeing, knowing and thinking have become powerful. This book explores how these algorithms are sites of acute tensions. This book argues that these forms of algorithmic thinking can only really be understood through a focus on their tensions. It uncovers the social and cultural dynamics of these systems, asking how we might understand the forces that shape and are shaped by the underpinning desire to automate. Drawing upon a range of resources, the chapters develop a series of concepts for understanding the framing, envisioning and implementation of algorithms. This book will be of interest to anyone who is concerned with the rise of algorithms, the modes of reasoning that circulate within them, and way that algorithmic thinking permeates society.
Developing an Approach to Social Harm
Authors: Billingham Luke , Irwin-Rogers Keir
Published: May 2023

In this chapter, we explain our approach to social harm, defined in reference to the concept of human flourishing: something is a social harm if it compromises human flourishing in a manner which could have been prevented. We suggest that a helpful notion of human flourishing draws together two related elements – need fulfilment and subjective well-being – and that it is possible to identify specific forms of harm which deny a person or people things that they need, or which undermine their well-being. We recognize that the two are often closely entwined in real-life experience. We also introduce a distinction between interpersonal and structural harms, where the latter are those generated at the level of social structures such as policies, systems and institutions. This analytical distinction, though rarely clear cut in reality, is important for the analysis in later chapters.
Harmful Responses to ‘Youth Violence’
Authors: Billingham Luke , Irwin-Rogers Keir
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores three kinds of response to ‘youth violence’ which we deem to be harmful: demonization, punitiveness and misguided attempts at ‘child-saving’. We trace the historical origins of the demonizing tendencies which appear to be most potent in the present, focused in particular on various notions of individual or group pathology. We then switch to policing and the criminal justice system, examining the harmful effects of measures such as youth imprisonment, gang injunctions, joint enterprise and over-policing, critiquing them on three main grounds: ineffectiveness, social harm and disproportionality. Our discussion of ‘child-saving’ centres on those tendencies within the public and charity sector which (1) align with demonization by concentrating on individual moral character and seeking to address isolable ‘pathologies’, thus drawing focus away from wider social conditions; and (2) industrialize and sensationalize the problem of ‘youth violence’, often in a manner which both exploits and stereotypes young people.
Algorithmic Bias in Digital Space: Twitter’s Complicity in Gender-Based Violence
Authors: Morgan Cat , Hewitt Sarah
Published: May 2023

As society becomes increasingly connected, digital spaces like Twitter have become more important. However, in this same space online abuse, such as ‘negativity, hostility and trolling’, are frequently used to silence women, particularly when discussing and responding to instances of violence against women. Although community trust and safety rules have been updated multiple times, the platform relies on users to report abusive and threatening tweets. It remains unclear why some reports are upheld where others are denied. We argue this is because Twitter has become a socially constructed ‘masculine space’, where most tech employees who enforce the rules are male. This chapter investigates why existing procedures do not work for everyone and how Twitter has created an infrastructure that is toxic to women.
Not the Wild West: Femonationalism, Gendered Security Regimes and Brexit
Authors: Fanghanel Alexandra
Published: May 2023

On 31 December 2015 throngs of men profited from the New Year’s festivities in Cologne, Germany to rob and sexually molest women revellers. At the time, it was widely reported in the press that the attackers of these women were predominantly men who were Black and foreign. Initially, men seeking asylum from Syria were blamed for the attacks, subsequently it was discovered that many of these perpetrators were from North Africa. These attacks, in Cologne and in other parts of Germany, sparked nationalist backlashes that continue to reverberate around Europe. This chapter examines how imaginaries of migrant sex crime against women has been used to mobilize ideologies of nationhood and of belonging, not least in pro-Brexit pre-referendum discourses. Across the spectrum of the political right and the political left rhetoric about the female body – violated by the Black Other – has been mobilized as both crucible and synecdoche for the forging of a vision of nationhood. This chapter considers some of the implications of the discourses expressed here, which mobilize the figure of the woman-as-victim and enshrines rape culture within the fabric of the nation-building.
Cultures of Cannabis Control
Authors: Brewster David
Published: May 2023

From the local to the global, the governance of illegal drug use is becoming increasingly fragmented. In some contexts, prohibitive regimes are being transformed or replaced, while in others, there are renewed commitments to criminalized control. But what gives rise to convergence and divergence in processes of policy making, across different countries as well as within them? And how best can these patterns be conceptualized and explained? Based on empirical qualitative research with elite insiders and documentary analysis, this book principally explores movements in cannabis policy in England & Wales and the Netherlands while also examining a range of policy approaches to cannabis across the globe. Building on Garland’s The Culture of Control and using Kingdon’s multiple streams model, an original comparative analysis reveals the factors which facilitate or hinder punitive and liberalizing tendencies in cannabis policy making processes at national and subnational levels in different contexts. The book concludes with future directions for policy making and comparative criminology.
Cannabis Policy in Global Perspective
Authors: Brewster David
Published: May 2023

Chapter 2 traces the development of cannabis policy in global perspective. Through exploring the international conventions, frameworks and debates that emerged from the 20th century onwards, the chapter discusses how developments at a supranational level have provided both the grounds for commonalities as well as space for a diverse range of approaches to emerge. From there, the chapter goes on to identify the range of response types, and their variants, that can be seen in contemporary cannabis policy – prohibition, depenalization, decriminalization and legal regulation – using exemplars from across the globe. This draws attention to the central theme of the book: why diversity in cannabis policy exists across the globe despite assumed convergence under globalized conditions, and how such patterns can be explained.
Problematizing Cannabis
Authors: Brewster David
Published: May 2023

Chapter 4 examines the first stream of Kingdon’s (1995) multiple streams model: the problem stream. The chapter identifies the various ways in which cannabis has been constructed as a policy problem requiring political attention at the national level of policy making. The empirical cases of England & Wales and the Netherlands are discussed in turn, focusing on two national policy movements (the 2009 reclassification of cannabis in England & Wales, and the 2012–13 changes to coffeeshop policy in the Netherlands). The chapter then moves on to examine recent policy changes in Canada and Jamaica to further elucidate, clarify and contrast the problematization of cannabis.
Beyond the National: Policy Negotiation, Resistance and Subversion
Authors: Brewster David
Published: May 2023

Chapter 7 moves beyond the national level to look at how cannabis policy has been negotiated, resisted and/or subverted at subnational level. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the extent of convergence and divergence between national and subnational levels of governance. Building on the analysis presented in earlier chapters, it first explores how changes instigated at a national level unfolded at subnational level within England & Wales and the Netherlands. Then, the chapter discusses the role of the subnational level in policy negotiation, resistance and development in Japan and the United States.
Postcards
Authors: Steadman-Jones Richard
Published: May 2023

Two people tell a story. This is an interpretative piece that explores the nature of collaboration from the perspective of two imaginary characters.
Worldizing
Authors: Pahl Kate , Pool Steve
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the role of theory in the work of collaborative research. To try to explain how theory comes into the lives of our projects, we tell personal stories about moments of realization where the reading of theory directly connected to how we understand the world of our projects. In the middle of the process of making and doing within the thick of it, new concepts of research and knowing emerged.
Worthiness
Authors: Vasudevan Lalitha
Published: May 2023

Worthiness is a necessary precursor to empathy, which is vital for the type of collaborative and participatory co-production research we sought to pursue in the ‘Reimagining Futures’ project. The work of organizing research projects to create conditions for more than the mere inclusion of multiple voices in the research can be seemingly inherent in research pursued with (rather than on or about, for example) communities, organizations, young people, or some combination thereabouts.
‘Most people don’t believe me’
Authors: Newhouse Katie Scott
Published: May 2023

A poetic piece on the materiality of believing.
Hypertext
Authors: Steadman-Jones Richard
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the potential of the form, hypertext, to be applied to collaborative interdisciplinary projects. It explores the potential for that form to let in diverse voices and encourage co-writing and collaboration.
Introduction
Authors: Teo Sarah
Published: May 2023

This chapter introduces the argument, research design and contributions of the book. Drawing from insights offered by differentiation theory and power politics, this book establishes a new framework to study middle power behaviour in Asia Pacific multilateralism. The key argument is that middle powers pursue a dilution of major-power stratificatory forces as well as functionally differentiated roles for themselves in multilateral diplomacy. The book seeks to contribute theoretically to the middle power literature, as well as empirically to the knowledge of why and how middle powers shape Asia Pacific multilateralism. The chapter also offers an overview of the subsequent chapters.
The Study of Middle Powers and Their Behaviour
Authors: Teo Sarah
Published: May 2023

The contemporary study of middle powers has focused primarily on defining the concept and examining the foreign policies of such states. While there has yet to be a standardized definition of what middle powers are, the literature suggests three primary ways of approaching the concept, based on material capabilities, identity and behaviour. This chapter reviews the existing approaches to middle powers, with the aims of: establishing a working definition for middle powers which is then used to identify Australia, Indonesia and South Korea as middle powers in the Asia Pacific; drawing out the underlying notion of differentiation in the extant literature; and, highlighting the widely acknowledged link between middle powers and multilateralism.
Shaping the East Asia Summit
Authors: Teo Sarah
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the circumstances surrounding the formative days of the EAS that was first conceptualized in 2001 and through its expansion in 2011. Against the backdrop of the Asian financial crisis, US counterterrorism strategy post-9/11, Sino-Japanese rivalry and proliferation of ASEAN-centred multilateralism, the behaviour of Australia, Indonesia and South Korea contributed towards diluting major-power stratificatory forces and enabling them to assume functionally differentiated roles. Through the EAS and its associated processes, all three countries sought to moderate the overwhelming influence of major powers in the region. The functions of middle powers as initiators of or facilitators within regional multilateralism were also reflected in the approaches of Australia, Indonesia and South Korea towards the EAS.
Medical Embodiment: Intersex as Disorder
Authors: Garland Fae , Travis Mitchell
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores how, since the 19th century, in the West intersex bodies have become primarily constructed through a medical lens of ‘disorder’. The increasing pathologization throughout the 20th century and technological advancements gave medical professionals the ability to ‘correct’ intersex bodies in infancy. The result of such early ‘correction’ was to erase intersex at the cultural and institutional levels. This has meant that medicine has largely shaped understandings and responses to intersex, defining it as a ‘disorder of sex development’ and surrounding treatment with shame and secrecy. Paternalistic attitudes, the young ages of the intersex people involved and a lack of longitudinal data collection have further contributed to healthcare’s framing of intersex as a disorder in need of ‘fixing’. As a result, healthcare has routinely used non-therapeutic surgical interventions to physically shape the intersex child’s body to fit the gender binary. Medical responses to intersex have centred on attempts to erase intersex as a political space or an identity and instead focused on protecting the gender binary and heteronormative society.
Hate Crime Policy and Disability
Authors: Taylor Seamus
Published: May 2023

Twenty years ago, Disability Hate Crime was unheard of in Britain. Today, it is a significant criminal justice concern. This book asks and answers the questions as to how and why Disability Hate Crime developed as a criminal justice system policy concern. It analyses the development of Disability Hate Crime in the criminal justice system in England and Wales and provides the first comprehensive account of this issue’s development. This book analyses the contributions of activists, politicians, policymakers and CJS practitioners to this area of hate crime development. It uniquely analyses the challenges posed by the pervasive view of disability targeting in crime as vulnerability targeting. It points to practical ways through this challenge. It also addresses the under-recognition of disability prejudice–hostility and links this to the wider non-recognition of a fuelling ideology of ableism. While the book identifies Disability Hate Crime as an unsettled and unsettling agenda, it offers an optimistic view that a combination of legal policy change and a critically reflective approach on the part of policymakers and practitioners can lead to progress on Disability Hate Crime such that it becomes embedded as ‘business as usual’ rather than unusual business in the criminal justice system.
Displaced, Profiled, Protected? Humanitarian Surveillance and New Approaches to Refugee Protection
Authors: Ewert Lina
Published: May 2023

This chapter seeks to examine the social impact of surveillance humanitarianism, using the UNHCR’s biometrically induced governing of Syrian urban refugees in Jordan as a case. Drawing on interviews conducted with Syrians in 2018 in Jordan, it sheds light on how Syrians perceive the introduction of iris scans and centralized databases for identification/authentication into aid distribution. The chapter critically engages with the refugee agency’s claim of progress and improvement by contextualizing it as surveillance culture and contrasting it with the lived experiences and imaginaries about the power of new technologies on the side of refugees. The chapter shows that the practice of humanitarian surveillance is highly ambiguous, contributing both to partial empowerment of urban refugees as well as to their potential exposure to new perils and old power asymmetries and relations of extracted value from data about already marginalized groups. It argues that the governance techniques visible in forced migration and population control have long colonial and historical roots, and their emergence and operation are deeply entwined with capitalist political economy.
Echoes of Imperialism: Crisis, Conflict and the (Re)configurations of Otherness in the Evros/Edirne Borderlands
Authors: Teunissen Peter , Koutrolikou Penny
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores how migrants have been instrumentalized in the Evros/Edirne border region between Greece and Turkey; which has witnessed numerous wars, conflicts, and imperial conquests, resulting in a shifting conception of insiders and outsiders. First, it will analyse how EUropean border imperialism embodies and (re)produces a fear of being surrounded by barbarians, once a directing discursive trope in settler colonialism. Second, seeing how states treat migration as an exchangeable commodity, the chapter explores how this has taken place within the framework of the EU-Turkey statement and within national interests. Third, the chapter discusses the adverse repercussions that such discourses and practices have on mobilizing and strengthening nationalisms and on the lives of people on the move themselves. In doing so, it argues that current border and migration regimes must be understood as interwoven with historical and contextualized repertoires of imperialism, reproduced in constructions of regionalized otherness.
A Pandemic-related Turning Point: Precarious Work, Platforms and Utopian Energies
Authors: Cingolani Patrick
Published: May 2023

In the context constituted by the pandemic crisis and the reconfigurations of work and employment that will follow, this chapter returns to the sociological issues raised by precarious work and precariousness, and the dynamics of alternative subjectivities. During the health crisis, care workers and those in contact with customers have been impacted by the pandemic. Teleworking, which combines professional duties with lockdown, and platforms, which perform a great number of supply functions, are replacing former commercial activities. This chapter asks how such forms of outsourcing and distancing reconfigure precariousness. There is a particular focus on platform capitalism, a deregulation process that has subverted employment, erased the frontiers of enterprises and transformed the markers of work. While wider discussion legitimately focuses on labour and social regulation, it has neglected social imagination and practices. Delivery riders’ recent struggles and their presence in grassroots mobilizations in deprived urban areas, the use of platforms for the creation of exchange networks between urban and rural activities and the reshaping of the urban environment through the farming of seasonal produce offer glimpses of possible new forms of social experimentation.
Organizing and Self-organized Precarious Workers: The Experience of Britain
Authors: Hardy Jane
Published: May 2023

Precarious workers are widely considered too hard to organize, due to their fragmented workplaces and their intersection with other marginal statuses, including being women and migrant workers. This chapter considers disputes in Britain between 2015 and 2019, where, despite the lowest number of officially recorded strikes, some precarious groups of workers won stunning victories. These were achieved through differing strategies, often involving organizing through small independent unions, as well as large established ones. The focus is on three groups: low-paid women care workers, outsourced cleaners (largely from Latin America), and warehouse agency workers from Central and Eastern Europe. It is argued that the struggles of these groups of people need to be understood in their historical context in order to understand continuity and change in the economic and contractual nature of the work they undertake, as well as the specificity of the sectors in which they work.
Radioactive Strategies: Geopolitical Rivalries, African Agency, and the Longue Durée of Nuclear Infrastructures in Namibia
Authors: DeBoom Meredith J.
Published: May 2023

This chapter challenges ‘chessboard’ interpretations of infrastructural geopolitics in a realm often assumed to be the sole purview of great powers: nuclear energy. More specifically, it analyses how Namibian actors have employed radioactive strategies – a term used here to refer to the tactics through which actors use the geopolitical significance of nuclear infrastructures to advance their spatial objectives – to pursue their own spatial-political objectives in the context of nuclear geopolitics and uranium mining. It does so across temporalities ranging from German colonialism to apartheid South Africa’s quest for ‘the bomb’ and the Cold War to the war on climate change. The chapter explains how the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), Namibia’s liberation-movement-turned-ruling-party, transformed nuclear infrastructures from symbols of colonial and apartheid exploitation into core components of its quest for state-led extractive development. It begins with an overview of the colonial and apartheid origins of Namibian uranium before embarking on a more detailed analysis of SWAPO’s radioactive strategies during the Cold War, the US-led War on Terror, and, finally, the current moment of US–China rivalry. It concludes with a discussion of how attending to historical and geographic contexts and host country agency can shed new light on infrastructural geopolitics across multiple scales.
Argentina and the Spatial Politics of Extractive Infrastructures under US–China Tensions
Authors: Saguier Marcelo I. , Vila Seoane Maximiliano F.
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the influence of US–China geopolitical tensions in the political economy configurations of the energy and telecommunication sectors in Argentina. To do so it examines at a series of leading infrastructure projects that have reconfigured these sectors in recent years or that promise to do so in the future, and poses two questions. First, in what way do these infrastructure projects manifest geopolitical tensions between the US and China as well as the responses of the Argentinian state to such dynamics? Second, can these infrastructure projects be seen as contested socio-technical processes leading to the production of new forms of territoriality (rescaling of spatial-politics relations, transnational connectivity, and so on)? It concludes that Argentina’s infrastructure state overwhelmingly focuses on the promise of economic growth through the exploitation of nature, neglecting the serious environmental and social consequences of extractivist development.
Interlude : Locating Host-Country Agency and Hedging in Infrastructure Cooperation
Authors: Kuik Cheng-Chwee
Published: May 2023

This interlude pulls together themes of agency and hedging that run throughout many of the chapters in this volume. In it, Kuik develops a typology of host-country agency and addresses key questions: What explains variations of host-state agency? Why do some countries welcome foreign-backed infrastructure cooperation more than others? How do some smaller states hedge more effectively in infrastructure cooperation? It concludes, first, that infrastructure and connectivity cooperation – an increasingly salient aspect of international politics due chiefly to the growing US–China competition – are not just about big-power activism, but also about small-state agency. Second, hedging is increasingly prevalent in international cooperation, though remains understudied. And third, it reveals that while power competition at global and regional levels provides the space and leverage for smaller states to hedge, exactly how individual states engage is conditioned by domestic attributes, most notably elite legitimation and internal resilience, thus pointing to the importance of analysis at multiple scales.
Gender as a Matter of Life and Death
Authors: Ashcraft Karen Lee
Published: May 2023

In what sense is gender real? This chapter reviews Part I’s answer to that question, which boils down to this: Our bodies are physically constituted by gendered sociality, whether we’re aware of it or not. Yet the gender binary denies the basic porosity of our bodies, insisting instead that autonomous, self-contained Man is possible and desirable. The fantasy is killing us, literally. The book will demonstrate that planetary survival depends on our capacity to abandon the gender binary and its conceits. Preparing readers for what follows, the chapter summarizes key features of the new mode of gender analysis developed in Part I.
Crash Course
Authors: Ashcraft Karen Lee
Published: May 2023

For those who could use an introduction or refresher, this chapter describes what populism is and entails. Drawing on and distilling a large body of scholarship, it offers five “clues,” or vital signs, that populism is afoot: (1) a language of popular sovereignty (‘The People’ versus ‘the elite/establishment’), (2) antagonistic vibe as virtue, (3) a direct and intimate mode of leading and organizing, (4) a performative style that savors “flaunting the low,” and (5) an undeserving third party (an Other) with whom the elite/establishment are in cahoots.