bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Biographical approaches to mothering: identities and lived realities
Authors: Nurse Lyudmila , Moran Lisa , Sidiropulu-Janků Kateřina
Published: May 2024

The Introduction provides an overview of extant state-of-the-art international biographical research scholarship on mothering. It specifically engages with the book’s principal themes, which both shape and reflect the multidimensionality of mothering in diverse social and cultural contexts, social circumstances and culturally anticipated narratives of idealised motherhoods. It further highlights the complexities of policy-based narratives of mothering and motherhood, which are socially and culturally variable, both in and across time, while underlining contradictions between policy-based understandings of mothering on the one hand and the complexities of women’s everyday lived experiences on the other. Key theoretical and biographical narrative methodological perspectives on mothering are discussed in relation to salient topics – definitions of mothering identities through the prism of biographical research methods – emphasising ethics and the cultural sensitivity of the biographical approach.
Biographies of Roma mothering in contemporary Czechia: exploring tapestries of multi-ethnic gendered identity in a marginalised social position
Authors: Sidiropulu-Janků Kateřina , Obrovská Jana
Published: May 2024

The chapter is based on a thematic narrative analysis of 25 in-depth biographical interviews conducted with Roma mothers in Czechia in 2018 within the larger scope of the international ISOTIS project (Inclusive Education and Social Support to Tackle Inequalities in Society). The focus of this chapter is on construction of the multiple roles and identities that Czech Roma mothers experience while living in highly marginalised contexts with regard to their ethnic-minority and low-income backgrounds. Their life narratives reveal patterns of mothering in their families of origin; how they became mothers (physically, socially and emotionally); what it means to them to be a mother; and how they reflect on their own socialisation and the imposition of their socialisation on the daughters they raise, assuming that they too will become mothers one day. The various forms of mothering experiences intertwined in their biographical stories are sometimes in line with more traditional family role models, but, at other times, represent Roma women’s complicated efforts to become emancipated from a larger family, poverty and social marginalisation. Their narratives present the symptomatic struggle between traditional expectations and the changing social conditions in which these mothers live.
Identities and life choices of mothers in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in England
Authors: Nurse Lyudmila
Published: May 2024

The identities of mothers are interwoven into their multiple roles, and are often caught in between their individual identities and collective identities, their sense of belonging and their parental duties. Mothers constantly negotiate their identities by facing economic hardships, social, cultural and racial stereotypes, and are challenged by societal expectations of parenting styles. Societal expectations of the role of mothers are high, but what does it mean to live up to these expectations in a disadvantaged area of England while providing children with what they need? This chapter focuses on the findings from a biographical study of mothers of primary school children in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in Greater London, UK. Biographical narrative analysis contributes to an imaginative dialogue between two mothers on life choices, the meanings of mothering, parenting and mothers’ identities.
Non-mothers: identities, ambiguity, biography making and life choices
Authors: Cronin Joan
Published: May 2024

This research draws on interviews with Irish women who consciously decided to forego the motherhood mandate, opting instead to pursue a life without children. The study examines the motives that influenced the women in their decision making, considers the ways in which society reacts to the women’s decision making, and the strategies and identity management techniques that women engage in to preserve a positive sense of self. The women’s narrative accounts document the complex and ambiguous development of a life trajectory based on personal desires and ambitions, free from the commitment and responsibilities involved in raising children.
Conclusion: Towards universal institutional protection for precarious workers in the era of melting labour
Authors: Seung-yoon Lee Sophia
Published: May 2024

The concept of melting labour served as the analytical prism throughout the book to establish the contours of emerging precarious workers and their variety. The book focused on melting labour as companies and capital evolved the capital accumulation mode alongside technological development. The issues observed in newly expanding forms of work overlapped with the Korean labour market, such as platform work, freelancers and other long-standing issues related to non-regular workers and precarious self-employed workers. The new non-standard forms of work went beyond the departure from the standard ‘employment relationship’, and the forms of work were changing in ways that differed from existing standards. However, the precariousness issues associated with these types of work were consistent with those discussed thus far for non-regular workers. The long-standing problems of non-regular workers and those brought about by the emerging ‘form’ of work needed to be explored from a comprehensive and integrated perspective.
Colonization of childhoods and identities of resistance
Authors: Liebel Manfred , Budde Rebecca , Markowska-Manista Urszula , Meade Philip
Published: May 2024

The Introduction clarifies why issues of children and children’s rights should be considered in relation to colonization and coloniality. It explains why children’s rights are considered indispensable for improving the lives of children, but also how they must be conceptualized to be experienced by socially disadvantaged and marginalized children as meaningful and can be used by them in their own interest. In order to get a concrete idea of children’s living conditions and collective interests, the Introduction explains the concept of ‘childhoods of the Global South’ as well as the less common concepts of the ‘popular’ and ‘popular childhoods’. The book is primarily concerned with the question how identities of resistance emerge in these childhoods. As such, how to get an idea of colonization processes is also explained. The traces they have left on social relations, on the thoughts and feelings of young people, and how these can be counteracted, are discussed.
Sexual History Evidence And The Rape Trial
Authors: Conaghan Joanne , Russell Yvette
Published: May 2024

The use of a rape victim’s sexual history as evidence attracted intense public attention after the acquittal of footballer Ched Evans in 2016. Set within the context of a criminal justice system widely perceived to be failing rape victims, the use of sexual history evidence remains a flashpoint of contention around rape law reform. This book mounts an important interrogation into the use of a victim’s sexual history as evidence in rape trials. Adopting a critical multidisciplinary perspective underpinned by feminist theory, the authors explore the role and significance of sexual history evidence in criminal justice responses to rape. The book is divided broadly into three parts, the first of which attends to history, the second to law, and the third to philosophy and critical theory. The authors demonstrate that concrete legal and policy problems around the use and/or restriction of sexual history evidence in the courtroom cannot be resolved without a much wider problematisation not only of social and cultural attitudes towards sexual behaviour, but also of the knowledge foundations which render these attitudes real and intelligible. This book is the first full-length historical and theoretical treatment of sexual history evidence and the rape trial and will be of interest to scholars and students of criminal and evidence law, as well as those interested in sexual violence and in social and criminal justice more broadly.
Conclusion: What Is to Be Done about Sexual History Evidence?
Authors: Conaghan Joanne , Russell Yvette
Published: May 2024

In Chapter 8, we draw together our analysis to reflect on the question: What is to be done about sexual history evidence? While we are sceptical of the capacity and ability of law to ‘solve’ the problems associated with sexual violence, we see some promise in a normatively embedded approach to law that matches the aspirations of the imaginary domain (Cornell, 1995), through which we continue to envision and strive for the equality and social justice we want to see. To this end, we gather the most promising options open to law and policymakers, as we see them, and reflect on avenues for further thought and research. Ultimately, doing the difficult and painstaking work that thoughtful research on sexual violence requires demands both dexterity and reflexivity in respect of the commitments we make to each other and ourselves, whether through or with the law or outside it, as well as to the horizons of possibility for the future.
The Early Days of Positivist Criminology: An Ideology of Universalism and Otherness
Authors: Mehozay Yoav
Published: May 2024

The chapter follows the emergence of the positivist school in criminology and its establishment as the leading paradigm for Western criminological knowledge production. It first provides a short historical review of positivism as a system of thought. It then situates the rise of the positivist school in what is defined as the ‘age of degeneration’, and follows its origins to the initial attempts, even before Lombroso and the Italian School, to explain criminal behaviour based on the idea of the pathological self. In this regard, the chapter reviews early systems of thought by which the discourse of otherness entered and shaped the vocabulary of the field, including moral insanity, physiognomy, phrenology, moral statistics, and biological anthropology.
Two Versions of Otherness: Between Eugenics and Modernization Theory
Authors: Mehozay Yoav
Published: May 2024

The chapter reviews the history of Western positivist criminology in the early decades of the twentieth century, focusing on the transition from the neo-Lombrosian era of multifactorial causes of delinquency to the growing influence of the Chicago School and the shift to sociological theories of crime. It situates this transition in the context of the welfarist reform and the eugenic movement during the Progressive Era. The chapter argues that this development in criminological thought generated a new version of otherness, one based on modernization theory (that is, knowledge for an other who can be acculturated and educated), and which adds to the version of otherness reflected in eugenic logic (knowledge over the other). For both, despite their differences, the idea of the pathological other is central.
Conclusion: A Science of Otherness?
Authors: Mehozay Yoav
Published: May 2024

The last chapter of the book summarizes and recapitulates the different versions of otherness that have served as both ideological points of departure and conclusions for various schools of thought and paradigms in the field of criminology. It brings to a closure the argument that Western criminological thought represents a ‘science’ of otherness. The second part of the chapter calls for forms of alternative knowledge that start from a position of concern, not about the ‘problematic other’, but about the problems faced (and communicated) by real people, replacing solutions by and for ruling elites with social compromise. The chapter then briefly recalls the history of critical and radical thought in Western criminology, which it argues can serve as the foundation for such knowledge. The chapter ends with a short discussion of two promising alternative directions for knowledge production in the field: decolonizing criminology and Southern criminology.
Necroharms: Obscene and Grotesque Violence
Authors: Iliadou Evgenia
Published: May 2024

The chapter explores the human consequences of the ‘necropolitical’ (Mbembe, 2003) border regime upon the lives which are made ‘unliveable’ (Butler, 2004). It focuses on the manifold abandonments (left-to-die practices) of border crossers, inside and beyond the refugee camp, in appalling conditions that not only are tantamount to torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, but also inflict, normalize and naturalize disposability, humiliation, social death and suffering. This chapter builds on Achille Mbembe’s (2003) work on necropolitics to explore the governance of migration through abandonment to social death. It also builds on existing academic literature on the politics of abandonment, the production of humiliation and degradation, racialized social death and disposability as a modus operandi of migration governance (Cacho, 2012; Davies et al, 2017; Mayblin et al, 2019; Gordon and Larsen, 2021).The chapter also engages with three bodies of literature: the social harm approach (Hillyard and Tombs, 2007), critical migration and border studies (De León, 2015; Squire, 2017) and social anthropology of violence (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004). It provides insights into border crossers’ lived experiences of violence. Furthermore, the paper contributes to the growing academic literature on the politics of abandonment (Davies et al 2017; Gordon and Larsen, 2021; Mayblin et al, 2019), and disposability as a modus operandi of migration governance.
Thanatoharms: Governing Migration through Violence and Death
Authors: Iliadou Evgenia
Published: May 2024

In this chapter, I focus on the continuum of politics of closed borders and explore the human consequences of the thanatopolitical border regime upon lives which are apprehended ‘unlivable’. I particularly explore the continuum of border deaths off the coasts of Lesvos – as people cross the Aegean Sea – as well as inside the refugee camps on Lesvos. This chapter is about (temporal) violence and state- and policy-facilitated stealing of time. In the existing academic literature, time – temporality – is examined as a fundamental feature of the border and migration governance, and as a border technique (Tazzioli, 2016). The first section of this chapter has a self-reflexive vignette from a fatal shipwreck that took place in 2012 on Lesvos. The second section explores the thanatopolitical border regime, characterized by deterrent policies and practices which have been enforced at, within and beyond the borders. These lethal policies have greatly escalated in the light of the 2015 refugee crisis by inflicting border deaths. The third section focuses on the continuum of deliberate ‘deterring-killing’ policies and practices, actions and inactions – by state officials and border agents – of exposure and abandonment of border crossers to death or to a high risk of death.
Conclusion
Authors: Iliadou Evgenia
Published: May 2024

In this book, I argue that the multiple border policies and practices that have been enforced in light of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ inaugurated the interference of actors who semi-settled and operated in Greece by turning Lesvos into a securitized and militarized place. On the one hand, all these agents not only enabled the border policies and practices, but also made the dystopia of borders possible by becoming complicit in border violence. In other words, the violent border policies would not be possible without the complicity of key security actors, professionals and street-level bureaucrats as well as ‘ordinary citizens’. On the other hand, these border policies and interventions led to a strengthening and expansion of intervening actors’ power and promoted and expanded, legitimized and normalized their capacity for violence (Massaro and Boyce, 2021). These multiple intervening actors as well as the ordinary citizens who are located within the border play a significant role in ‘the production and performance of borders’ (Pickering, 2014, p 188). I showed that the capacity for violence of each of these actors creeps into the various stages of border crossers’ perilous journeys across borders and the registration, identification, asylum and deportation procedures, in the Moria hotspot and beyond, on the island of Lesvos and in the port and the city centre, in the streets through stop and search, sweep operations, policing and criminalization. This capacity for violence and impunity has produced a suffocating and intimidating reality from which border crossers cannot escape.
Learning From Care Experienced Perspectives
Authors: Boddy Janet , Hanrahan Fidelma , Wheeler Bella
Published: May 2024

Chapter 2 begins with an overview of key policy and legislative contexts for young people in and after care, reflecting on how key family-related features of children’s lives and care experiences (including the presence of siblings, recurrent removal of children into care from the same parent/s and so on) are recognized within policy and published data. The chapter then goes on to discuss ethical and methodological debates in researching vulnerability. It sets out the argument for taking a narrative approach to thinking through family in care-experienced lives, challenging the tendency for categorizations of ‘vulnerability’ to disempower, silencing narratives of resistance and obscuring complexity. This discussion links to a detailed overview of the two studies, addressing methods, study contexts and sample recruitment and characteristics, and documenting the analytic approach to linking the two datasets.
Re/Configuring Boundaries: Who Counts as ‘Family’?
Authors: Boddy Janet , Hanrahan Fidelma , Wheeler Bella
Published: May 2024

Chapter 4 considers how family practices shape family boundaries, considering who ‘counts’ as family and examining family connections over time and through experiences of placement in childhood. Participants in the two studies had very varied experiences of placement – ranging from a single foster or kinship placement from early childhood to adulthood, to experiences of 20 or more placements, and of residential care and mother and baby placements (especially in the Pause sample). This chapter addresses participants’ narratives of the practices that enable a placement to feel ‘like family’ – or not – and explore the different possibilities for doing ‘family’ that participants highlight in their narratives of placement.
The Governance of Alternative Consumer Cooperatives
Authors: Oba Beyza , Özsoy Zeynep
Published: May 2024

It is difficult to pursue the values of participation, solidarity and equality in investor-owned companies and the managerialism underlying them. This chapter explains how participants of the alternative consumer cooperatives (ACCs), by being against neo-liberal policies and the politically exclusionist attitude of the ruling groups, aimed to develop and experiment with an alternative governance model based on democratic and dialogic decision-making practices such as horizantalism and consensus-based decision-making. The chapter also discusses the various means experimented with for prefigurative organizing and volunteer work in the alternative cooperatives with a focus on the viability and sustainability of these practices, especially those related to informal inequalities.
Urban Growing in Glasgow
Authors: Traill Helen
Published: May 2024

Chapter 2 positions the field sites in the broader context of Glasgow’s urban growing scene and its specificities. Putting communal growing projects in the context of Glasgow’s history of urban regeneration contextualizes attempts to build something different. It sketches a history of top-down urban regeneration in which local people have had little say, against which the reimagination of the two growing sites sits. Connecting the swathes of derelict land and urban wilderness in the city to blight narratives and creative destruction allows for the context of Glasgow to be counterposed against other cities in which work has been done on communal growing. The community growing literature has been heavily dominated by work coming out the US that differ in important ways from the context here. In outlining this history and context, this chapter sets up many of the concrete and theoretical concerns developed later: questions about how derelict land is used, and what it could or should be used for.
The Rhythms of Urban Escape
Authors: Traill Helen
Published: May 2024

Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre on rhythms, this chapter outlines the escape created within communal growing projects. Drawing from participant observation and interview data, this chapter explores the practices that distinguish the case studies from the rest of the city. Tracing the way that value emerges, it argues that communal growing projects reimagine what work comes to mean and what can be deemed socially valuable. The chapter moves between narratives from the field and theoretical questions around the affective nature of the time-space of the city to recognize the experience of escape as one of temporal sovereignty. It also introduces a key theme of the book in the politics of this escape, which rests on the ability to imagine a different way of being within practices of collective escape.
The Political Imagination of Common Justice
Authors: Traill Helen
Published: May 2024

If urban growing is political, why is it not always seen this way in the field? This chapter extends the political analysis of communal growing projects through an engagement with lay imaginaries of politics within growing and their diversity. It does so to offer a different perspective on communal growing’s politics, and to explain why politics as a frame doesn’t work in the field. It explores subjective experiences of politicization and some of the resonances of the idea of politics within the context of Glasgow, within Scotland and the UK at this political moment. This is to unpack some of the ambivalence of escape as a political terrain, and does so with an eye to how time and a preference for a common justice framing shape the interpretative understanding of communal growing projects, complicating narratives around the politics of such projects.
Conclusion
Authors: Traill Helen
Published: May 2024

The concluding chapter weaves together the key themes of the book, to reflect on the interconnection of community, politics and justice in communal growing projects, in the way they claim spaces in the city and their articulation of alternative and autonomous ways of living. It highlights the productive ambivalence of the spaces, particularly knitting together inclusionary and radical reimaginations of the city with boundary work and strategic neutrality that effectively positions the sites beyond politics. It argues that attending to the afterlives of growing, how it moves and changes, is critical both for assessing the politics of growing projects and for attending to their purported place in sustainable cities. The chapter offers reflections on what might be taken forward in such sustainable work and the enduring attraction of communal growing as a research space, as well as the shifting opportunity structure within Scotland’s policy landscape that might facilitate a greater value being placed on communal growing projects as a critical part of the city’s social infrastructure.
Populism and the People: Elitism, Authoritarianism and Libertarianism
Authors: Forkert Kirsten , Guderjan Marius
Published: May 2024

The chapter examines the political performance and ideology under Boris Johnson’s premiership. It aims to enlighten the causes and contradictions of the libertarian yet authoritarian populism governing the UK. Instead of living up to the populist ideals of people-centrism, anti-elitism and popular sovereignty, key members of government represent an elitism thriving on an affective polarisation within British society. Under Boris Johnson, trolling and misinformation have become a new standard in government communication, while the elite in power has broken political conventions and claimed liberties for themselves which the vast majority of the British people do not enjoy. As both authoritarian and libertarian practices and policies have become ‘normalised’, the chapter focuses not only on the communication strategy and style of the Conservative Party under Johnson’s leadership, but also on the ideological bases that complement their populism.
Britain in a State of Emergency: Studying Ken Loach’s Films I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019)
Authors: Grünkemeier Ellen
Published: May 2024

The films I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019) by director Ken Loach and scriptwriter Paul Laverty make for a viable case study to investigate social, economic and political divisions in contemporary Great Britain, not least because social realist cinema is strongly interrelated with the contexts from which it emerges. While the films do not address Brexit or the COVID-19 pandemic on their story levels, they highlight social divisions and problems that have resulted from a decade of austerity politics. Creating vignette narratives of the everyday realities among the White working classes in northern England, the films show characters struggling to survive in a society shaped by neoliberalism and global capitalism. What keeps the protagonists going is a dissatisfaction with their ways of life, their anger at the status quo and a sense of injustice.
Class, Poverty and Inequality in Scotland: Independence and the Creation of Affective Polarisations
Authors: Morelli Carlo , Mooney Gerry
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the 2014 Scottish independence referendum through the lens of affective polarisation. The apparent homogeneity within the ‘YES’ for independence opinion-based identity combined a multiplicity of differentiating and contradictory affective ‘in-group’ polarisations which themselves related to more traditional structural-based identities. The chapter demonstrates that the structural identities of class, poverty and inequality were predominant within the affective polarisations visible within the Scottish independence movement. The chapter further examines the extent to which these affective polarisations are associated with longer-term changes in the electoral base for the Scottish National Party after 2014. The chapter concludes that support for a second independence referendum, Indyref 2, is inextricably linked to the extent to which the independence movement continues to provide an affective polarisation which centres on an optimistic vision of a radically different independent Scotland.
Decolonizing Development
Authors: Keahey Jennifer
Published: May 2024

Post-Soviet Latvia and post-apartheid South Africa are far apart geographically and yet have endured a similar history of colonial and authoritarian rule before transitioning to democracy at the end of the twentieth century. This book examines these two nations in an unusual comparative study of post-authoritarian efforts to decolonize production and trade.The book combines an analysis of political economy and ecocultural heritage to unpack alternative trade formations. It also connects world systems thinking with Indigenous knowledge to articulate a decolonial theory of development and change over the longue durée. Conclusions and insights drawn are timely and important for a planet confronted by crises such as authoritarianism, laissez-faire capitalism, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indigenous Baltic Knowledge: Daina Philosophy
Authors: Keahey Jennifer
Published: May 2024

This chapter documents and interprets Indigenous Latvian philosophy for an international readership. It joins a textual analysis of Latvian Dainas with autoethnographic reflections, showing how one of the largest cultural bodies of recorded folk songs in the world transmit intergenerational wisdom and ecocultural values grounded in an agrarian way of life. The chapter concludes by situating the Dainas in sustainable development context.
Indigenous African Knowledge: Ubuntu Philosophy
Authors: Keahey Jennifer
Published: May 2024

This chapter documents a multiracial body of Ubuntu philosophy and interprets key lessons for an international readership. It joins a textual analysis of the apartheid resistance literature with autoethnographic reflection to show how South Africans are engaging the Ubuntu ethic to organize communities and heal collective trauma. The chapter concludes by situating Ubuntu in sustainable development context.
Fair Trade and Rooibos Terroir in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Authors: Keahey Jennifer
Published: May 2024

This chapter shares research findings from a participatory action research study conducted with Rooibos tea farmers at a time of market crisis and against a backdrop of systemic scarcity. It weaves a broader analysis of the racialized political economy informing the Rooibos tea sector with a cultural history of a marginalized yet heritage rich people who are producing Rooibos tea in the Indigenous way of their ancestors at the geographic origin of this culturally important product.
‘He’s shown me the road’: Role Model and Roadman
Authors: Harris Peter
Published: May 2024

This chapter outlines a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between male adult youth work professionals characterised, or as I shall argue, positioned, as ‘role models’ and young men positioned as ‘roadmen’. It begins with a critique of social policy that promotes male role models for young men in the UK, as it relates to both formal and informal education settings. It then sets out a theoretical perspective on masculine subjectivities using positioning and psychosocial theory and highlights some implications for our understanding of relationships between male youth professionals and young men. Using a closely observed case study of a young Black man and his older White male youth worker, the author argues that male youth workers seeking to proffer alternative ‘roads’ for younger men need to develop a deep, reflexive awareness of their own and young men’s identity constructions. The chapter concludes that social policy making and professional training regimes may need to be more acutely attuned to the complexity of these professional relationships.
Establishing the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Torture
Authors: Evans Malcolm D.
Published: May 2024

This chapter sets out the background to the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Torture (OPCAT) and how it developed over a 25-year period from a proposal to be incorporated into the text of the UN Convention against Torture itself into a freestanding legal instrument establishing the largest and most distinctive of the UN human rights treaty bodies. Along the way, the difficulties faced in bringing this project to fruition also resulted in the adoption of the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture, and at a very late stage the addition of ‘National Preventive Mechanisms’ into the OPCAT system. It provides an important case study concerning the generation of international human rights instruments over time and provides essential background for understanding the work of the OPCAT system today.
Visits: An Insider’s Story
Authors: Evans Malcolm D.
Published: May 2024

This chapter seeks to take the reader into the world of a UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (SPT) visit, providing a first-hand account of the experience of undertaking preventive visits to places of detention within the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Torture system: what they feel like and what they can (and do) achieve. It draws attention to some of the practical problems which need to be overcome to exercise an international visiting mandate effectively in what might be a hostile environment and how these might be overcome in practice. Above all, it highlights the remarkable extent to which the SPT has been able to gain access to places of detention because of the way in which it has structured its work.
Star & Shadow Cinema: A Grassroots Interface between DIY Culture, New Co-operativism and the Commons
Authors: Wallers Christo
Published: May 2024

As democratic control of urban space is becoming less and less available under neoliberal urban ordering (Stavrides, 2016), what models exist in the UK to contest and reverse this form of enclosure and increase democracy in how urban space is managed?Using the case of Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle upon Tyne, this chapter explores developments in ‘new’ and ‘open’ cooperativism in line with thinking around ‘urban commoning’ to analyse a recent pattern in DIY Cinema culture. As an inflorescence of DIY counterculture, voluntarist self-managed cinemas have taken ownership of their spaces, utilizing cooperative structures to protect urban commons long term. Yet these examples are not steeped in pre-existing cooperative culture, and instead represent a political tension between the solidarity economy and common pool resources. The chapter argues that this tension can be resolved by demonstrating and promoting the practical synergies between DIY culture, commoning and new cooperativism.
Reproducing in Climate Crisis
Authors: Roberts Celia , Rasmussen Mary Lou , Allen Louisa , Williamson Rebecca
Published: May 2024

What does it mean to be pregnant or take care of a newborn during climate crisis? How is the current state of the planet changing people’s experiences of reproduction and kin? This book tells stories about people’s experiences of reproduction during the catastrophic Australian bushfire season of 2019–2020, in which more than 8 million hectares – one third of the country’s forests – were burnt. Analysing interviews with pregnant women (and sometimes their partners) as well as various experts, participants’ photographs and drawings, and our own stories of living through this crisis, this book delves into the details of life during an extreme climate event that was immediately followed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapters discuss breath, bushfire smoke and the technologies associated with assessing smoke-related risks, new formations of care and kin, and participants’ thoughts about what it means to have children in these circumstances. Engaging with First Nations and other scholarship on fire, we critically introduce the notion of the Pyrocene to describe our current era, and propose our new term, Pyro-reproduction, to articulate the entanglements of reproduction, kin and climate crisis.
Kin, Care and Crises
Authors: Roberts Celia , Rasmussen Mary Lou , Allen Louisa , Williamson Rebecca
Published: May 2024

All of the parents in our study were caring for a newborn during the bushfires and/or the COVID-19 pandemic. These crises threw up intense challenges as ‘families’ were articulated in particular ways by health and other governmental authorities. ‘Families’ were often connected to ‘homes’, as if they are the same thing. New terms, such as ‘care bubbles’, had to be invented to acknowledge that this is often not the case and new rules were invented about who was close enough (emotionally and legally) to be allowed to be physically co-present in homes they do not legally share. How did pregnant women and parents of newborns seek help in extreme and unprecedented environmental conditions? How did formal and informal pregnancy, birth and postnatal care change in this period? In what ways does climate crisis make more people aware of the challenges of kinship and of the need to think again how we understand kin, including kinship with the more-than-human? Responding to these questions, we draw inspiration from Donna Haraway’s work on response-able and inclusive futures, and related writing on queering kin-making possibilities beyond heteronormative nuclear family reproduction in the context of both reproductive justice and ecological crisis
Antisemitism in Football
Authors: Poulton Emma
Published: May 2024

While racism, racialization and antiracism in football have been extensively studied, antisemitism within football has received comparatively less scholarly attention. Among the possible reasons for this academic neglect are the relatively low number of Jewish professional footballers and the debates pertaining to a hierarchy of racisms and whether antisemitic hate crime should be treated as a distinct form of racism. Yet, as this chapter evidences, antisemitic incidents are a common occurrence in English men’s football, with some high-profile examples both on and off pitch in recent years involving officials, club owners, coaches, players and, most frequently, supporters. The chapter provides an overview of expressive’ has positive connotations, so I would change this to ‘forms of antisemitism expressed within men’s football. It first discusses problems of contested definition of the phenomenon and then covers the scale of ‘religious’ hate crime in the United Kingdom (UK). Next, the nature of antisemitism in the UK is outlined before examining its prevalence and presence within English football fan culture. Finally, the chapter focuses on English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur, whose supporters are the target of the majority of antisemitism within English football. This includes a discussion of the different uses and meanings of the controversial term ‘Yid’, which for many people in Britain today is an ethnic epithet and ‘race hate’ term, but which has taken on differing subcultural meanings within the context of English football fan culture. This is because for some 40 years, some Tottenham fans have appropriated and paradoxically used this taboo word as a term of endearment in songs and chants in an attempt to deflect the routinized antisemitic abuse they receive because of their perceived identity as supporters of a ‘Jewish club’.
Reimagining the Health and Fitness Industry as a Site of Deviant Leisure
Authors: Gibbs Nick
Published: May 2024

Chapter 3 is the first analysis chapter of this book, and serves to first introduce the theoretical commitments that underpin the work, before mapping the gyms under study as sites of consumption, sociability, and labour. The schools of ultra-realism and deviant leisure are first unpacked, before an argument that the gym represents a site of contemporary consumption is advanced, wherein these spaces of committed bodywork have been submerged by a tide of commodification and ‘gym gentrification’. Tensions are then unpacked around the hardcore gym as a space of sociability for users, whereby sites such as Muscle Sanctuary and Predator simultaneously represent arenas of fraternal kinship and competitive individualism. Finally, the gym is interrogated as a site of labour and ascetic hedonism, and links are drawn to Potsford’s industrial heritage of craft and graft.
#Ripped: Social Media, Prosumption, and Bodily Desire
Authors: Gibbs Nick
Published: May 2024

Chapter 7 sets out to examine the role of social media platforms in perpetuating bodily desire and, by extension, the use of IPEDs. First, a visual photomontage is offered, depicting the most-liked images that were shared by the sample. This is utilized to position social media sites as manifestations of the contemporary Big Other, for which the men perform and parade their physiques in hope of validation. Yar’s concept of will-to-representation is then built upon to propose a ‘will-to-recognition’, wherein users’ posts are dictated by their fidelity to the digital Big Other. These sites, particularly Instagram, are then conceptualized as the digital Lacanian mirror, where the highly selected and often edited images put forward distort the men’s self-image, leaving them estranged from their own digital form. This process, the chapter argues, is underpinned by an inversion of the ego ideal and the ideal ego, leaving the sample desiring their own fantastical self-representation online. The chapter concludes with the contention that social media sites are potent dopogenic environments, where the highly cultivated, digitally mediated images stimulate bodily desire and dissatisfaction.
Spatial Imaginaries and Geopolitics in US–China Rivalry
Authors: Regilme Salvador Santino F.
Published: May 2024

This introduction discusses the analytic premises of the book’s core puzzle: the variation across territories and regions of great power rivalry and cooperation in the 21st century, focusing on US–China bilateral relations. China and the US are the two most powerful state actors in the post-COVID-19 world order, with China challenging the US economically and in global financial governance through initiatives like the Belt and Road and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. While the US remains the biggest spender on national defense, China has made significant advancements. China is also cooperating with Russia in key voting issues in the UN Security Council, although the US is the key state actor in most intergovernmental organizations. This chapter introduces spatialization as a conceptual tool to understand the variations of US–China relations across world regions.
The Middle East and Changing Superpower Relations
Authors: Chen Chien-Kai , Ergenc Ceren
Published: May 2024

This chapter compares and explains the American and the Chinese foreign policies toward the Middle East through a conceptual lens of “path dependence.” Most importantly, taking a scalar and place-based approach toward global politics, this chapter examines how the iterative dialogical interactions between the US, China, and other actors in the Middle East and beyond have helped forge and maintain the different “paths” that the US and China have been taking in the region. Finally, this chapter also discusses whether and how the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 would bring about a new political and economic landscape in the Middle East and as a result create a “critical juncture” for China to move away from its non-interventionist path and become more assertive on the issues facing the region in order to protect and promote the growing interests it has there.
Europe’s Role in US–China Strategic Competition
Authors: Maher Richard , Schöfer Till
Published: May 2024

This chapter analyzes Europe’s role and place in US–China competition with a focus on Huawei’s presence in Europe’s fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. This case reveals three broader features of Europe’s role in US–China competition. First, European countries’ desire to expand their economic links with China while continuing to depend on the US for their defense represents the central challenge they face in this new strategic environment. Second, while US and European views on China have converged in recent years, they are not identical, and European countries are unlikely to take as firm a position toward China as countries in Western Europe did against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Third, while internal divisions will prevent Europe from acting as a third power alongside the US and China in world politics, Europe will still be able to shape its regional environment and influence US–China competition in various ways.
A History of Accountability in Criminal Courts
Authors: Townend Judith , Welsh Lucy
Published: May 2024

Chapter Two provides historical context on the way in which open justice and accountability have developed in England and Wales. It considers modes of accountability in the criminal process, public participation in the criminal courts, and its development in recent decades.
It looks at the place of open justice in a wider tradition of justice system accountability, sitting alongside and underpinning other important tools. As part of this exercise, the authors detail the main methods for contemporary observation of physical criminal court hearings and access to different information types, drawing attention to the main obstacles and gatekeepers.
They also explore the main theoretical rationales for the contemporary approach to open justice which, it is suggested, can be categorised as punitive (shaming), deterring, educational, scrutable (ensuring fairness and proper conduct). The chapter then critiques these various arguments, proposing that understandings of justice system accountability need to recognise their weaknesses and strengths.
The authors introduce one of their core arguments, that policy and law makers should prioritise informational transparency as a means of scrutiny and education, rather than as a means of an individual’s punishment and deterrence.
The Role of the Public and Media in Observing Justice
Authors: Townend Judith , Welsh Lucy
Published: May 2024

Chapter Four delves beneath the surface level understanding of open justice, looking at the mechanics of the principle: the roles of different media and civil society actors, the design of the channels and platforms and the financial costs (among other features). Because of the idiosyncratically decentralised and piecemeal nature of the justice system, many practices have evolved over time, in inefficient and unjust ways, without purposive design. Some of the inconsistencies have become more apparent and problematic in virtual environments.As well as attending to the practical detail of court observers’ work, the authors unpack the rationales justifying observers’ presence in court and begin to develop a conceptualisation of open justice that thinks beyond the news media and traditional model of court reporting, despite the trend for limiting certain access to the ‘accredited’ press. In doing so, they consider factors of ‘justice-worthiness’ as well as the ‘newsworthiness’ of cases in court. The chapter also exposes how systemic failures are often mechanical rather than legal faults.
‘To Preserve and Promote’: Gendering Harm in Green Cultural Criminology
Authors: Letourneau Angeline Marie
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores how gendered representations of resource development affect individual and collective behaviour and how these characterisations shape attitudes and policies. Taking a cultural criminological approach, I turn attention to how narratives of frontier masculinity uphold the oil and gas industry in the province of Alberta – the oil and gas powerhouse of Canada and home to the contentious tar sands oil deposits. The construction of environmental harms speaks to gendered and racialised structures of power. Activities associated with masculinity with significant ecological and social footprints are portrayed as innovative, noble or, at worst, an unavoidable trade-off for economic wellbeing in male-dominated industries. This chapter illustrates how the gendered framing of issues related to extraction in Alberta plays on gender norms that are culturally embedded, leaving many of these processes uninterrogated. I conclude by exploring how a critical gender approach can illuminate and challenge the hegemony of resource development and fossil fuels culturally and politically.
Introduction: Contested Representation in Burma/Myanmar
Authors: Matelski Maaike
Published: May 2024

Burma/Myanmar has faced prolonged periods of military rule and hosts some of the world’s longest internal conflicts. In the early 2000s, hopes flared up at the local and international level for democratic reform under the military’s ‘Roadmap to Democracy’. These hopes were crushed as the military continued to dominate the political landscape and terrorize the population. It continued its violent treatment of ethnic minorities, resulting in large-scale crimes against the Rohingya in 2017. After handing over power to the National League for Democracy, the military again staged a coup in 2021, which resulted in a large anti-coup movement and escalating military violence against dissidents. This introduction sets the context of the political transition period between 2010 and 2020, outlines the methodology and positionality of the researcher, introduces the concept of civil society as a lens through which these political developments are analysed the various perceptions on social and political change in Myanmar at the local and global level. It introduces the following chapters in which civil society identities and tactics in pursuit of local change and global recognition are analysed. The chapter ends with an explanation of terminology, including the use of Burma or Myanmar.