bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sustainable Ownership
Authors: Boeger Nina
Published: January 2025

Chapter 5 explores the design elements in sustainable ownership: corporate purpose, power and profit. It introduces elements operating in social economy organizations but also those that operate in the wider economy. In the social economy, these encompass community interest companies, cooperative or community benefit societies and companies limited by guarantee operating under a non-distribution constraint. Those in the wider economy include purpose-driven firms that distribute profits, including certified B Corps or firms incorporated (outside the UK) as a benefit corporation. The chapter considers stakeholder co-determination and mutual and employee-owned firms as well as companies in foundation ownership. It provides no comprehensive survey but addresses what these forms of sustainable corporate ownership might be able to offer to improve public service outsourcing and reduce existing problems and failures.
Nurturing Sustainable Ownership
Authors: Boeger Nina
Published: January 2025

Chapter 6 considers that by outsourcing more services to sustainably owned suppliers, the state can create important secondary benefits in terms of strengthening the role of these organizations in the economy while also improving public service outsourcing. Winning public contracts can help these organizations access finance and build other important resources (such as governance and measurement tools) to sustain and grow their business, to innovate, to diversify and to reward their workers. There is potential for a positive feedback loop in which the state can create win-win by reducing outsourcing risks at the same time as nurturing more sustainable market actors, tempering the wider problems of a financialized corporate economy for society.
The Legal Framework
Authors: Boeger Nina
Published: January 2025

Chapter 7 assesses the potential design of a new procurement policy on sustainable corporate ownership, which would likely be permissive, leaving scope for discretion and experimentation with bidders mapping themselves against the criteria of sustainable ownership (purpose, power, profit). It considers how the policy might be accommodated within the current legal framework for procurement, assuming, given its very recent introduction, that appetite for further legislative changes will be limited, at least in the short term. The chapter considers both reserved contracting procedures and award criteria relating to quality and wider social value. Substantively, the policy would have to be assessed carefully against a number of risks, including its potential impacts on competition and capabilities in service delivery and on existing social economy organizations. These, however, are not intransigent problems in the medium term.
Conclusion
Authors: Boeger Nina
Published: January 2025

The conclusion briefly summarizes the overall argument of the book.
Introduction: The New Age of Angst
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

This introduction provides an overview of the key themes of the book addressing the conditions and challenges that currently confront the citizens of established democracies, particularly in the UK and the US as the nations that originally adopted and exported the neoliberal ideas and arrangements that became the global social, economic and political ‘common sense’. Here it is argued that it is precisely the arrangements established by the adoption of this model and their intensification of late that are responsible for generating a state of ‘permacrises’ permeating numerous aspects of contemporary life, from individual health and wellbeing to the civility, security and political stability of our societies, while leaving us vulnerable in terms of the growing challenges posed by climate change and artificial intelligence.
Who Are We and Why Does It Matter?
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

This chapter sets out the main theoretical framework that informs what follows in the subsequent chapters. The biosocial model The Social Map challenges current social scientific approaches, arguing, in the first instance, that the avoiding of biological explanation within the social and political sciences has obscured understanding of critical aspects of how we relate to each other and the societal arrangements we create. This has allowed a variety of misconceived notions of who and what we are and the conditions that best meet our needs to go unchallenged, creating opportunities for the powerful to maintain conditions that support their interests in opposition to the fundamental needs of the majority. Moreover, it is argued that the negative consequences of this scenario are much more profound than is currently understood in terms of both their immediate and longer-term implications. In the first instance, there is the destabilization of individual and collective lives that we are currently witnessing. However, key developments in neuroscience and epigenetics drawn upon here suggest that we are not only enduring mental, physical and wider social consequences from these arrangements in the present, but that we may also be negatively affecting the development of succeeding generations.
The Long Road to Modernity
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

This chapter engages with some the key historical stages in the development of Western societies from the ancient world to the end of the medieval era and the roots of the modern era, as a starting point for providing context for the arguments presented in later chapters. The main theoretical ideas are applied here to re-evaluate how we might understand these key stages and to provide further insight into the way in which our social development is better understood via an approach that engages with both the biological and social, as opposed to the one-sided wholly social explanations that tend to currently prevail. Specifically, the way in which our evolutionary derived cognitive and emotional capacities have shaped social arrangements, and vice versa, is addressed. Principally, the argument is presented that a strong current in human history can be understood with reference to an emotionally driven need to make sense of, simplify and establish a sense of order and control our experience. This drive is what motivates us to establish and manage the regular and routine aspects of everyday living and is reflected in our wider social organization and culture. The issue of competition between competing visions of the form of order that should be imposed and sustained is also addressed as an evident central feature of individual and collective social life.
Financial Alchemy and Economic Crises
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

This chapter focuses on the resurgent power of the financial sector as one of the most significant features of the neoliberal turn. A financial sector that had been regulated and contained since the 1930s was unshackled in response to a revival of the belief in the inherent efficiency and self-regulating tendencies of free markets. This chapter considers the relationship between financial sector activity and the growing indebtedness, inequality, work and housing insecurity that have greatly extended risk and political instability in contemporary developed economies, while linking this to biosocial imperatives described in earlier chapters. A further argument here maintains that a significant feature of ‘big finance’s’ wealth creation and exercise of power has been greatly facilitated not necessarily by success in its traditional activities, but by various forms of ‘innovation’, where profits and wealth have been created by the conjuring of assets divorced from the ‘real’ economy. This has further resonances with respect to the central theoretical model, in terms of understanding the implications of our inhabiting of a world where the line between the real and imaginary can be unclear, and where the narratives that shape everyday lives are often determined by the influence of economic elites.
Globalization, the ‘New’ Labour Market, AI and the 4th Industrial Revolution
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

This chapter engages with some of the well-documented labour market issues arising from the neoliberal-led form of globalization, such as the offshoring of labour and the role of the financial sector in shifting corporations towards a model privileging ‘shareholder value’ and short-term profit accumulation, overturning a prior focus that was more favourable to long-term growth and stakeholder obligations. The chapter also addresses currently accelerating labour market changes precipitated by the digital revolution. Contrary to assertions that technological advances deliver more new jobs than they destroy, it is argued that the growing capacity to replace human cognition has called this into question, while these trends are already in motion, given the increasing prevalence of nonstandard forms of employment associated with the ‘gig economy’. In qualification, however, it is important to note that this is by no means an argument in favour of restricting technological progress. Rather, it is argued that, without careful management and prosocial intervention, harnessing these technologies in the service of social as well as commercial priorities, these trends will likely increase inequality and further undermine the stable employment that once rendered working lives and family finances manageable, and developed economies and societies more stable, during the high modern era.
Conclusion: Where to Now?
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

The concluding chapter pulls together the threads that run throughout the book, highlighting the multiple problems that have emerged from current socioeconomic arrangements, while addressing where we might go next, particularly given ever more evident climate breakdown and the potentially epochal changes and challenges posed by AI. On the one hand, we will likely be influenced to press on with business as usual as we deal with the latter, courting a deepening of our current troubles and a potentially more oppressive response from elites defending the status quo and seeking further advantage. Alternatively, we have the option of reining in our overuse of resources that threatens the planet while harnessing technological change to reduce the burden of overwork and share its benefits more evenly and cooperatively. Reduced working time, greater freedom, revived communities and real relationships and, critically, a lessening of the insecurities, injustices, pressures and demands that pervade our societies is possible. Moreover, as both history and current experience indicate, the ramifications of inaction in this regard go much further than the grassroots level, given that fractious peoples tend to turn to autocratic leaders offering hollow nationalistic and bellicose visions of national renewal that, in turn, may threaten to undermine peaceful international relations. Despite these being evident the numerous dilemmas that currently confront us, the chapter concludes on a qualified hopeful note. This reflects the view that crisis points are often turning points and that there is clearly a measured optimism and desire for something better among the young, a window at least before the pessimism, angst and anger that is inherent in our current way of life intrudes.
What Do Corporations Want?
Authors: Kuhn Timothy
Published: January 2025

‘Purpose’ has become a battleground for contemporary corporations. Indeed, a common refrain among scholars and practitioners alike is that the key problem facing the firm is the development and pursuit of a purpose – a singular purpose – compelling to its multiple audiences. Yet the forces of late capitalism push firms toward forms of wanting that oversimplify purpose and interfere with what those firms need to become to meet their multiple aims. This book argues that understanding corporations’ pursuit of purpose requires that we see them not as stable entities, but as complex communication practices continually bound up in struggles over meaning and action. Corporations’ wanting is, therefore, an ongoing site of contestation. Drawing on a unique combination of Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) and Deleuzian new materialist thinking, the book articulates a Communicative Theory of the Firm, a distinctive explanatory account that departs sharply from economics and strategic management approaches. The Communicative Theory of the Firm articulates a novel stance on how corporate purposes result from ‘authoritative texts’ that encode the promises of value and claims to property that are central to firms’ existence and operations. Through three detailed empirical case studies that take up communicative practices of boundarying, branding, and binding, the book shows how the authoritative text, as analytical device, provides insight into how firms’ efforts to order themselves via a unitary purpose paradoxically disorders both their practices and future possibilities. Ironically, however, this disorder can foster new forms of imagination for both firms and analysts’ engagement with them.
New Forms of Value Generation Under Communicative Capitalism
Authors: Kuhn Timothy
Published: January 2025

The aim of this chapter is to describe the socioeconomic shift toward ‘communicative capitalism’ and what that recognition summons from analysts. It begins with an account of how Fordism (and its standardized production, stable workforce, and the provision of adequate wages) became the predominant form of production and capital accumulation during much of the 20th century. Communicative capitalism, however, represents a new model of value generation, emphasizing the central role of communication in three central organizational practices: affect capture through emotional labor, platformization facilitated by digital infrastructures, and branding as a logic of socioeconomic life. The chapter highlights the implications of these shifts for organization studies, calling for a re-evaluation of traditional understandings of organizations as stable entities versus seeing them as fluid practices, which leads to a call for a shift towards practice-based analysis.
Boundarying: Inclusion and Exclusion in Dynamic Capability (Re)Development
Authors: Kuhn Timothy
Published: January 2025

The first of three case studies discusses the concept of boundarying and its implications for firms' dynamic capabilities in the context of managing customer service performances under communicative capitalism. The chapter shows how boundarying is the result of agential cuts, where organizing practices generate conceptions of the real that become eligible for inclusion and exclusion in/from practice. The authoritative text, introduced in Chapter 4, is identified as a conceptual tool necessary to understand the influence of strategizers and the local performance of service encounters, particularly when the competencies developed in those encounters are ambiguous and tenuous. The case concerns a growing US airline, highlighting its approach to boundarying through the authoritative text, which includes valuing ‘soft’ skills, fearing the dissipation of distinctiveness, and caring for its employees. It then discusses the dis/organizational consequences of the airline’s deployment of its authoritative text. It frames the mode of internal organization associated with a need to capture affect as a communicative practice and, using the Communicative Theory of the Firm (CTF), demonstrates how efforts to develop dynamic capabilities create unintended and ironic consequences.
A New Future for the Theory of the Firm
Authors: Kuhn Timothy
Published: January 2025

The book’s concluding chapter summarizes the claims of the book and condenses the unique perspective offered by the Communicative Theory of the Firm (CTF). It highlights the significance of the CTF in reimagining firms’ purposes as ontologically multiple and the influence of communicative capitalism in shaping their desires. It challenges traditional theories of the firm by emphasizing the need to understand the communicative becoming of firms in response to communicative capitalism. It also suggests three future directions for further developing the CTF, including digitalization, the centrality of the natural realm, and corporate advocacy. The chapter underscores the complexity of grasping what and how corporations want, emphasizing the importance of this understanding if scholars are to develop heuristic, useful, and critical conceptions of contemporary firms.
Beyond the Free Food Store: Building Bridges
Authors: Alakavuklar Ozan Nadir
Published: January 2025

This chapter extends an invitation to academics within business schools to reconsider their engagement with research, advocating for more in-depth collaboration with community and grassroots organizations. Drawing inspiration from ethnographic research conducted at the Free Food Store, the chapter introduces the concept of ‘activist performativity’ as an alternative scholarship approach that melds critical praxis, activism, research and teaching, with the overarching goal of fostering a more socially just and sustainable society. The chapter is grounded in the author’s personal journey to transform himself into a critical scholar bridging multiple realms and serving as a living example of activist performativity. This chapter aims to inspire collective change, reshaping the often alienating research practices within the academic sphere.
Still in Search of Alternatives: Do We Have an Answer Yet?
Authors: Alakavuklar Ozan Nadir
Published: January 2025

In this concluding chapter, based on his engagement at the Free Food Store, the author reflects on the critical roles played by faith, the use value of food and labour, and the complex web of power relations in providing valuable insights into the realm of alternative organizing. Through a dialogue with strategies of social change and the inherent paradoxes emerging through the operation of the shop, a comprehensive analysis is presented, offering an in-depth understanding of the possibilities inherent in the Free Food Store as a source of inspiration for envisioning and practising alternative organizing for social change. The chapter culminates by envisioning a vital role for the university as an anchor institution, one that fosters the creation and bridging of infrastructures for co-imagining alternative futures. This vision is realized through the collaborative efforts of grassroots and community organizations, actively addressing the pressing challenges of our society on the ground.
Health Citizenship
Authors: Mills Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

Chapter 5 traces changing citizenship practices as they are embodied by HIV-positive women in South Africa, and as they coalesce around emergent political concerns that fan out from the historic assertion of the right to life linked to HIV medicine. The chapter explores multiple dimensions of South African citizens’ imaginaries as they ‘saw’ and ‘spoke’ to the state; these imaginaries reflect on and develop the set of ‘new generation struggles’ that are detailed in the previous chapter and that, I argue, reflect South Africa’s shifting medical and political landscapes in the wake of the antiretroviral rollout.
Global Health Governance
Authors: Mills Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

Chapter 7 moves out in scale from South Africa and Brazil to reveal how national, regional and international actors assemble around a rapidly changing set of international agreements on intellectual property that govern the development and distribution of essential medicines. The first section focusses on the World Trade Organization’s role in governing access to essential HIV medicine through the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement. The second section considers a set of patent-related challenges around access to affordable treatment for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), like India, South Africa and Brazil. The final two sections explore forms of resistance: the penultimate section outlines the role played by BRICS, and specifically South Africa, Brazil and India, in resisting and reforming the global governance of essential medicines around a range of illnesses, including HIV, COVID-19, tuberculosis and cancer. Specifically, it explores the crucial role played by India in reverse engineering medicines that would otherwise have been inaccessible to most countries in the Global South due to their pricing in the Global North. The final section considers the role of civil society organisations and global health agencies in advancing more sustainable and equitable forms of global health governance.
Conclusion
Authors: Mills Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

The final chapter draws the findings of the five substantive chapters together and considers the implications of the shifting political landscape in which this multi-sited ethnography was located. In doing so, it explores the limits of agency for both governments and individuals to exert autonomy over their vitality within a global assemblage that draws actors that shape life under the skin – like HIV and antiretrovirals (ARVs) – into a network with actors – like South Africa, India, Brazil, the EU and the World Trade Organization – that govern the development and distribution of essential HIV medicines. In considering these implications, the conclusion reflects on the value of two overarching contributions of the book in researching the intersection between women’s embodied experience of medicine and their political engagement with the state. First, the concept of diffracted biosocialities reflects emergent biopolitical struggles that fan out from a narrow focus on illness to include and integrate struggles that happen ‘inside’ the body (linked to HIV and ARVs) with the context ‘outside’ the body (linked to violence, unemployment, sanitation). Second, the related concept of biopolitical precarity shows the entwined relationship between the state of the body and the body of the state and highlights the value of locating this historical biopolitical relationship in a global terrain.
Africa’s Health Diplomacy
Authors: van Wyk Jo-Ansie
Published: January 2025

Africa’s response to health challenges entered a new phase with the establishment of the African Union (AU) in 2002, with health added to its founding document. Despite this, the health of Africans has not significantly improved due to a plethora of national and international reasons. The poor state of the continent’s health was further diminished with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which added to Africa’s existing health and developmental challenges. The purpose of this chapter is fourfold. First, it sets out to explore the concept of health diplomacy. Second, it describes the state of health in Africa and the AU’s health architecture. Third, it analyses Africa’s health diplomacy. And finally, it outlines Africa’s health diplomacy in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Ghana’s Cultural Diplomacy
Authors: Asafo-Adjei Sandra
Published: January 2025

The essence of diplomacy can be regarded as the process to establish and maintain goodwill between states while simultaneously advancing national interests and resolving issues of international concern in a peaceful way. Cultural diplomacy can be defined as a state’s goal to ensure that its cultural assets and accomplishments are recognized abroad and embedded in its foreign policy to advance the interests of the state as well as communicate aspects of its culture. This chapter focuses on Ghana’s utilization of cultural diplomacy as an instrument of its foreign policy, and to promote tourism and to attract FDI. The chapter highlights the cultural identity and architecture of the people, the government and the diaspora of Ghana to position the Ghanaian state as a pacesetter in cultural engagements by reconnecting them to their roots and culture, and to contribute to the development of Africa, particularly Ghana, through FDI. Furthermore, the chapter examines the challenges that hinder Ghana from fully benefitting from the cultural engagements alongside what the country stands to achieve in strengthening its cultural diplomatic relations with other states.
Introduction
Authors: Rodgers Lisa
Published: January 2025

This chapter provides an overview of the relationship between social justice and labour law. It outlines the engagement of labour law with critical theory, and introduces Marxist and feminist approaches to labour law. It discusses the traditional social justice narrative of labour law (the coincidence of ‘labour is not a commodity’ and ‘inequality of bargaining power’) and the difficulties and contradictions that arise. It is argued in this chapter that fundamental to the difficulties and contradictions in the social justice narrative in labour law is the way in which personhood is conceptualized. This assertion is supported by an investigation of Sinzheimer’s critique of labour law and the person. The final section of this chapter seeks to suggest an alternative conceptualization of the person based around ‘relationality’. This conceptualization builds on Sinzheimer’s approach but also incorporates feminist and Marxist approaches to (legal) personhood.
The Worker and the Person
Authors: Rodgers Lisa
Published: January 2025

This chapter outlines the underlying tensions in employment status which derive from our understandings and commitments to different ideas and versions of personhood. It then proceeds to investigate how these tensions are manifested in the conceptual difficulties and failures around employment status. The chapter then discusses how the courts have attempted to resolve some of these tensions and some of the reform suggestions in practical terms. The penultimate section outlines an alternative conceptual model for employment status which might address some of the issues raised in this chapter: the softening of the categories and distinctions around employment status through the idea of ‘personality in work’. In the final section the limitations of the ‘personality in work’ model are identified, and an argument made for a more radical solution to the problems of employment status through moving towards a relational subject of law which incorporates (rather than rejects) dependency.
Meals: Occasions and Arrangements
Authors: Warde Alan
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines meal occasions and the associated social arrangements. It discusses the food content of Sunday lunch, mid-week dinners, mid-week lunches and breakfasts, noting differences between the 1950s and 2012. Simplification is a common feature. It also analyses time spent and the company present at events of different types, including the family meal. Meals are mostly brief affairs, constrained by other social activities which make coordination with potential companions often problematic. Eating out for pleasure on commercial premises came to play a significant role in food provisioning with restaurants increasingly providing both novel dishes and opportunities for socialising over a meal with family as well as friends. The chapter focuses on the conjuncture of forces of casualisation, individualisation and informalisation, finding evidence in snacks, eating alone, table manners and the decline of ceremonial ritual. It argues that a gradual modification of meal patterns occurred, with changes as much a consequence of shifting social contexts and temporal rhythms as personal preferences or ideals.
Fifty Million Brexit Tweets
Authors: Bastos Marco
Published: January 2025

This chapter presents the manifold methodological challenges associated with large-scale social media data collection, the creation of a database of monthly active Twitter users in Britain, and the process of triangulating geographic information to determine the user location. This includes the processing of geolocation data and the mapping of users onto electoral districts. We also considered the demographic biases of Twitter, the curation of the database, and the process of identifying political affiliation based on campaign advocacy.
Bots and Trolls
Authors: Bastos Marco
Published: January 2025

This chapter unpacks the activity patterns of a group of 13,493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted the Brexit referendum and disappeared from the platform shortly after the ballot. The Brexit Botnet comprises 5 per cent of the userbase that tweeted the referendum campaign, a group of users that was removed from the platform by Twitter moderators. The Brexit Botnet sheds considerable light on the weaponization of social media platforms that was central to the referendum campaign, while also exposing the role of algorithms in which bots feature as the most simple, cost-effective, and flexible approach to gaming the social media attention economy. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy developments in the aftermath of various congressional and parliamentary inquiries into foreign interference in national elections leveraging bots, trolls, and sockpuppet accounts to weaponize social media.
Constructing ‘Indigenous People’ Reproducing Coloniality’s Epistemic Violence: A Content Analysis of the Trafficking in Persons Reports
Authors: Boukli Avi , Papanicolaou Georgios , Dimou Eleni
Published: January 2025

This chapter interrogates the knowledge production process embedded in global anti-trafficking policy initiatives, as reflected in the annual US Trafficking in Persons Report (hereafter, TIPR). Using the conceptual framework of coloniality, we undertake content analysis of the TIPRs 2001–20. We show that policy interventions are still central in imposing colonial frameworks of knowledge and interventions globally and locally. Three main findings emerge from the content analysis: first, the references to ‘Indigenous communities’ and ‘Indigenous victims’ have been amplified over time. Specifically, from 2003 onwards there is a gradual but clear trend towards more of these references appearing in each subsequent iteration of the Report. Thus, there is a shift from a state of silence towards both wider visibility and labelling Indigenous victims of trafficking as extremely vulnerable. Second, these references portray Indigenous communities and individuals in relation to human trafficking as either ‘at risk’, ‘at high risk’, ‘particularly vulnerable’, or ‘most vulnerable’. While Indigenous victimization is becoming more visible, in most instances the problem is framed as human traffickers preying on individual victims or on certain communities, rather than recognizing how the continuous impact of the colonial matrix of power (that is, coloniality) permeates Indigenous lives including their victimization. Third, there is a clear geographical clustering around the regions of Central Africa, Central and South America, and South East Asia, which reflects global imperial hierarchies of power. Based on our findings we argue that the reports are infused with colonial systems of thought, which inflict and reproduce epistemic violence and colonial relations of power locally and internationally.
The Criminal Investigation of Human Trafficking Crimes in the UK: Benefits and Challenges of Police Collaboration During Police Investigations
Authors: Pajón Laura
Published: January 2025

A growing body of research has been published examining the detection, investigation, and prosecution of human trafficking crimes. Despite human trafficking being one of the most complex crimes to detect and investigate, police collaboration with partner agencies has been found to promote the prosecution of offenders and the safeguarding of victims. Nonetheless, discrepancies in the practice of police collaboration to investigate human trafficking exist in England and Wales. While multi-agency collaboration to respond to complex problems is a well-studied area, limited empirical knowledge exists on the practice of police collaboration during human trafficking investigations. This chapter provides insight into the complexity of conducting human trafficking police investigations and police collaboration through a data-driven understanding of how police collaborations are undertaken in practice. Through the examination of two police human trafficking operations, this chapter provides both an understanding of the benefits of police collaboration and the challenges and limitations faced by the police when collaborating with other agencies. Data were gathered from interviews with lead investigators, police files, and other official documents, and analysed through thematic analysis between 2018 and 2020. Findings reveal the importance of police collaboration to ensure a victim-centred and intelligence-led approach, highlighting the critical role of non-government organizations in promoting victims’ engagement. Nevertheless, further research on police collaboration during human trafficking investigations is needed to better inform practice.
Ethnic Performance Work
Authors: Mao Jingyu
Published: January 2025

This chapter provides a detailed account of what ethnic performance is like at the three field sites. Ethnic performance is a form of interactive service work through which minority, rural, feminized performers encounter Han, urban, mostly male customers in a physically proximate manner, which renders their social distance even more significant. After considering different sociological frameworks, this chapter argues that ethnic performance could be best theorized as a site of encounters where performers have to constantly encounter multiple bordering processes in relation to the rural–urban divide, ethnicity, and gender. The need to constantly encounter borders through everyday work and migration has an intimate and emotional consequence for performers. It shapes their entitlement to respect and motivates them to achieve a ‘modern self’ through off-work entertainment and consumption. These intimate encounters with borders also point to the need to see work and personal life as closely related and mutually constitutive.
Intimate Negotiations along Rural–Urban Borders
Authors: Mao Jingyu
Published: January 2025

Emotions are central to understanding the ways in which migrant performers experience and negotiate the rural–urban borders, most notably in relation to the hukou system in China. While migrants contend with an opaque migration regime, emotional reflexivity plays a crucial role in shaping their hukou-transfer decision. The broader emotional regime at the societal level profoundly shapes informants’ emotional reflexivity. In line with the state’s emphasis on happiness, positive energy, as well as ‘the China Dream’, migrants tend to use emotional management to frame their ‘negative emotions’ into ‘positive’ ones. The different meanings attached to the rural and the urban play a significant role in shaping informants’ personhood, as they seek to embrace migration in order to achieve a modern and valuable self. Yet, following migration, performers continue to experience rural–urban bordering through everyday work in intimate and emotional ways, which consolidate rather than alleviate their marginalization.
What Does Internationalization in Isolation Mean for Higher Education in Small Island States?
Authors: Craciun Daniela , Gayardon Ariane de , Baldacchino Godfrey
Published: January 2025

While internationalization is becoming ever more important for higher education systems globally, its elitist focus on academic mobility is problematic and excludes many students, staff and institutions. This exclusion pertains particularly to higher education on small islands, where isolation is a key geographical feature making inbound and outbound mobility difficult. This makes the study of internationalization on small islands especially interesting, potentially providing a way forward to more inclusive internationalization worldwide. For this study, we selected the University Consortium of Small Island States as a diverse case study. Through the analysis of strategic internationalization documents and interviews with key administrators at its five member universities, this chapter conceptualizes internationalization in small islands, providing valuable novel insights to further the debate on internationalization beyond mobility. In addition, it sheds light on the relationship between two concepts that are seen as antithetic: internationalization and isolation. This chapter is particularly important following a time when a global health crisis rendered mobility impossible, making all universities de facto isolated and demonstrating the urgent need to foster more sustainable and inclusive internationalization practices.
Glocalizing Higher Education and Decolonial Work in Oceania
Authors: Mikato Fa‘avae David Taufui , Uasike Allen Jean M. , Baldacchino Godfrey
Published: January 2025

This chapter explore the ways in which global imperatives and processes implicate and are embodied in and through local Indigenous knowledges and ways of meaning-making within the context of Oceania. The chapter articulates conceptualizations of small island higher education using local Indigenous perspectives and practices and decolonial intentions that seek to inspire and empower local communities in higher education spaces across Tonga and Aotearoa New Zealand. Through the method of talatalanoa, examples from the first author’s experiences of decolonial work across higher education spaces in Tonga and Aotearoa New Zealand are discussed. Decolonial work across higher education spaces is ongoing and fonua-whenua-inspired, relying on vā theory to activate the authors’ analyses of relational Indigenous being and becoming in Oceania. This chapter concludes by drawing attention to the importance of thinking globally but acting locally as a critical Oceanian vā practice that centres the things that really matter to local peoples, communities and small island states.
Resourcing Struggles for Social Justice from the University
Authors: Derickson Kate
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers the multiple locations of ‘the political’ in the bundle of social relations understood as scholarly knowing, and argues that at every stage where politics is located, there are opportunities to enact forms of justice. Drawing on previous work, and indebted to feminist thought, it is argued in the chapter that questions of politics, and more specifically questions of justice, inhere not only in objects of analysis or the frameworks mobilized, but in the social relations engendered in the act of knowing. Using Kirstie Dotson’s concept of ‘epistemic backgrounding’ to illustrate the way certain knowledge projects that appear concerned with justice can have limited purchase when they fail to prioritize the social relations engendered in the act of knowing, the chapter draw on two projects the author has been part of – the CREATE Initiative and the Gullah/Geechee Sustainability Think Tank – to demonstrate how a politics of ‘resourcefulness’ can promote justice in the process of scholarly knowing.
Reimagining Working: Who Works and How?
Authors: White Hannah
Published: January 2025

As a workplace, the UK parliament is fundamentally shaped by a hierarchy between Members and non-Members – expressed through rules and spatial restrictions and deeply embedded in its culture. This hierarchy affects the ability of parliament to provide an effective working environment which is safe and secure, and encourages equality, diversity and inclusion. This chapter places at the heart of reimagining, therefore, the removal of unjustified hierarchies. In essence, a reimagined parliament would conceptualise itself as an exemplar of best workplace practice and culture, rather than an exception to the rules shaping other workplaces.
Critical Pedagogy and Pedagogic Discomfort
Authors: Piacentini Teresa
Published: January 2025

This chapter introduces the key tenets of critical pedagogy and critical consciousness through the work of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux and bell hooks. It explores notions of public pedagogy, engaged pedagogy and educated hope, emphasizing the activist, radical, decolonizing and anti-oppressive potential of critical pedagogy, as well as its immediate relevance for ways of knowing and relating in the migration-focused classroom. The chapter introduces vocabularies and concepts that shape the book, in particular, ‘doing good harm’, referring to transformation through discomfort and the disruption of established systems and beliefs, and ‘migration literacies’, referring to the need to tune into the centrality of migration governance as a form of grammar and semantic structuring of how migration is understood politically, in public opinion, in media discourse and in the classroom. It sets out three key ideas that shape the book: critical pedagogy as a necessary confrontation with neutrality and power; interrogating migration knowledge as requiring the development of specific literacies; and learning as a multifaceted, multi-sited process. It then sets out three key interventions: recognizing the political now as historically constituted; embracing discomfort as a necessary means to enact positive change and ‘do good harm’; and acknowledging the vital role of migration literacies in disrupting and transforming the learning process.
Connections
Authors: Piacentini Teresa
Published: January 2025

The central focus of this final chapter is on connections: the power of establishing meaningful connections in the pursuit of transformative education and the ethics and politics of building connections. Expanding on the insights of previous chapters, it considers what connecting work can or should involve so that we achieve benefits for all when we actively foster, cultivate and nurture learning opportunities that extend beyond the confines of the classroom. It demonstrates what happens when we make that commitment to dismantling normative practices, centring the communities we serve as experts holding serious knowledge; how we manage discomfort that does good harm; and refusal as transformative resistance that can tear down problematic practices. It explores the ethical and political consequences of forging meaningful connections with communities at various points, including curriculum design, the development of course materials, supporting student projects that want to connect to communities, the implementation of connected teaching methodologies and building translocal, cross-disciplinary, cross-border connected classrooms. The chapter concludes with reflections on the ideas covered across the book, pulling together the connecting threads of this critical pedagogy of migration.
“Don’t Mind Me”: The History of Lurkers from Lerkere to Thriller
Authors: Sipley Gina
Published: January 2025

This chapter historicizes the myth of the lurker, tracing its roots from real-world abuser to surreptitious online reader by contextualizing a range of cultural texts from 14th-century poems to 21st-century memes. Lurking is perceived as malignant when its motives resist anthropocentrism, imperialism, and capitalism. This chapter sets out to problematize the negative connotations of lurking and illuminates the ways that lurking can be an active, participatory, and valuable act.
How Do We Account for Lurking? Implications for Social Science Researchers
Authors: Sipley Gina
Published: January 2025

Ignoring lurkers can invalidate critical social science research in education, health, and psychology, which often use social media participation as part of their data collection methods. If data collection does not account for lurkers, researchers reach only 10 per cent of social media users within the confines of their study. This could compromise the validity of the results and findings, thus having a detrimental effect on health and learning outcomes for people whose care and education rely on practitioners accessing accurate data. This chapter offers concrete strategies for ways to expand datasets to include the literacy practices of lurkers. It also explores the limits of platform sponsored tools like CrowdTangle for data collection and offers suggestions for how to ethically engage with lurkers.
Conclusion: Participatory. And Valuable?
Authors: Sipley Gina
Published: January 2025

This concluding chapter explores the question: can lurking be valuable if participation is not publicly (and easily) measurable? This chapter unpacks value as a social and economic construct and discusses the impact lurking has for platforms, companies, society, and ourselves. Rather than disband the use of the term lurker, the author argues that understanding ourselves as lurkers offers the possibility of more sustainable community relationships on- and offline.
Variations on the Great Refusal via Dante and Whitehead
Authors: Malaspina Cécile
Published: January 2025

In the third canto of Dante’s Inferno, Virgil leads the poet into the antechamber to hell. Here, among those who lived a life without blame and without praise, Dante recognizes the shadow of ‘the coward who made the great refusal’ (Dante, 1997 [1472], Canto III, verse 60/50). This chapter will pay close attention to the aesthetics implicit in the revival of this phrase, ‘the great refusal’, in Whitehead’s 1925 Lowell lectures, and in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1966). At stake is the elucidation of the tipping point whereby the connotation of the ‘great refusal’ can pivot from the stigma of self-serving cowardice to a mark of distinction of intellectual audacity, and in a more profound ontological sense, of aesthetic achievement, such that: ‘the truth that some proposition respecting an actual occasion is untrue may express the vital truth as to the aesthetic achievement. It expresses the “great refusal” which is its primary characteristic’ (Whitehead, 1948: 150, in Marcuse, 1966: 149). Elucidating Whitehead’s understanding of concreteness and abstraction will allow us to interpret this positive connotation of the ‘great refusal’ as an index of a twofold emancipation: the emancipation of reason and the emancipation of the imagination implying one another.
An Ethology of Abstractions: Learning How to Cultivate Our Modes of Thought with Stengers
Authors: Debaise Didier
Published: January 2025

Isabelle Stengers’ thought revolves around a strange demand: we must take care of our abstractions. She finds this demand in Whitehead’s philosophy, which she takes up in a singular and original way. Taking care of our abstractions implies two things: First, to diagnose our contemporary experience, the abstractions that govern our ways of thinking and have contributed to the modernist legacy. Second, to explore other modes of abstraction that would enable us to deploy the multiple forms of experience in a different way and reweave the links broken by the incessant bifurcations of modern thought. This question of abstraction, as I have tried to show in this chapter, is at the heart of aesthetic questions, where it implies both a resistance to the bifurcation between nature and experience, fact and value, and existence and aesthetics, opening up a new field on the varieties of aesthetic experience in nature.
Sleepwalk Through the Fires: Harm, Violence and Dangerous Subjectivities
Authors: Lynes Adam , Treadwell James , Bavin Kyla
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, we navigate the tumultuous terrain of harm, violence and dangerous subjectivities, peeling back layers to reveal the intricate interplay between these dimensions. Our exploration transcends conventional boundaries, delving into the physical, structural and cultural aspects that contribute to the genesis and perpetuation of violence and subsequent harm. The chapter begins by dissecting the multifaceted nature of harm, examining its manifestations on both individual and collective levels. From subtle manifestations of harm to overt physical violence, we traverse the spectrum, unravelling the threads that bind these phenomena to the human experience. Venturing further, the discourse extends to the concept of dangerous subjectivities – exploring how individual perspectives, ideologies and identities can become perilous in fostering a culture conducive to harm and violence. Drawing from the contemporary ultra-realist perspective, we dissect the intricate web of factors that shape dangerous subjectivities.