bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Singapore: Professionalising the Self
Authors: Hof Helena
Published: September 2023

Chapter 4 opens Part II Organisational and Career Mobility: Seizing Security, Success and Self-realisation, which turns to a second dimension of mobility that shapes migrants’ lives: employment situation and professional development, which manifest in organisational and career mobility in Singapore and Tokyo. Chapter 4 on Singapore shows how the young European migrants strive to live up to the image of innovation-driven and high-potential foreign talents as painted by the Singaporean state. Lacking substantial work experience but aiming for the highly skilled visa, the migrants attempt to professionalise themselves in the neoliberal labour market by repeated job transfers, which facilitate career mobility. The majority of migrants pursue mobile careers in which organisational mobility, career mobility and geographical mobility go hand in hand. of the book.
Tokyo: (Dis)Embedding in the Japanese Labour Market
Authors: Hof Helena
Published: September 2023

Chapter 5 on Tokyo outlines the Japanese employment system, in which foreign university graduates have increasingly secured career track positions in Japan’s primary labour market. Yet, pressure to conform to their firms’ homogenising company culture causes most of them to opt out. Overall, migrants’ employment patterns in Tokyo resemble those of migrants in Singapore by their frequent turnover. The analysis demonstrates considerable fluidity and overlap between the much-discussed sharp divide drawn between jobs in Japan’s primary labour market, that is, regular jobs, and those in the secondary labour market, including contract positions. The findings call for attention to the diversifying Japanese labour market, which offers a greater variety of career paths to highly educated early career migrants than linear career progression or stagnation.
Immobility and Emplacement: Making the City Home
Authors: Hof Helena
Published: September 2023

Part III, (Im)Mobility Through Differentiated Embedding: The Ties That Bind, complements the analysis of migrants’ geographical, organisational and career mobility by examining the non-work-related aspects of migrants’ lives abroad. It connects the EU Generation’s place making and socialising practices to intimacy and thereby unearths complex processes of differentiated embedding, which result in either repeated physical mobility or staying. Chapter 7 engages questions of the migrants’ interaction with the heterogeneous and constantly diversifying resident population of their host cities. Emerging feelings of familiarity and security allow migrants to varying degrees to develop a sense of belonging. Such differentiated embedding, rather than a full-fledged belonging or outright marginalisation, best describes the complexities of migrants’ prolonged staying in Singapore and Tokyo.
Introduction
Authors: Henshaw Alexis
Published: September 2023

This chapter introduces the book by exploring what is at stake in seeing the digital frontiers of gender and security. It introduces readers to potentially relevant international policies and to emerging international efforts to pursue security in the digital space, including via international law, state-level initiatives, and multi-stakeholder frameworks that engage technology companies and civil society. It argues that the current system fails to fully integrate gender and more broadly intersectional perspectives into an emerging discourse about security, technology, development, and rights. It further argues that a critical feminist security studies approach to these issues finds natural points for dialogue with – and should include – other critical perspectives including surveillance studies, queer theory, Black feminism, and postcolonial theory – necessitating an intersectional feminist inquiry.
Big Data and the Security of Women: Where We Are and Where We Could Be Going
Authors: Henshaw Alexis
Published: September 2023

This chapter introduces the technology of big data while also providing a methodological framework for the book rooted in critical feminist security studies. It begins by offering various definitions of big data and discussing the normative and ethical issues framing discussions about the concept. Discussing the coinciding emergence of ‘big data’ norms and an emphasis on gender-disaggregated data as advanced through policy mandates, it moves into a discussion of how the current policy environment has resulted in a patchwork of data collection efforts that vary in terms of inclusivity, validity, and reliability. This chapter draws on a comparative analysis of quantitative measures and indices related to gender as compiled by the World Bank, UN institutions, think tanks, and academic projects.
Technological Surveillance, States, and Gendered Insecurity
Authors: Henshaw Alexis
Published: September 2023

Drawing on insights from feminist and critical theories of international relations, this chapter examines how states engage in abusive uses of technology, creating gendered and racialized forms of insecurity. Cases discussed include the surveillance of feminist activists in China and the deployment of Pegasus spyware against activists for women’s rights and minority rights. It argues the need for an intersectional dialogue between feminist security studies and intersectional work that discusses the racialized nature of surveillance.
Resistance, Resilience, and Innovation
Authors: Henshaw Alexis
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the possibility for a more inclusive digital space, drawing on case studies and interviews with peacebuilders and practitioners who have used technology in novel ways. Common themes expressed by interviewees include an enduring concern about gender-based violence and harassment, the need to address inequalities as they manifest in the digital space, ambivalence in the relationships between activists and technology developers, and a concern about the future for in-person advocacy in the post-COVID-19 world.
Introduction
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

This introductory chapter underlines the importance of investigating the platform economy, something that has come to be intrinsic to our social fabric and daily lives. As platforms have instrumentalized the Internet to also mediate labor relations, they have come to shape and reshape our current world of work and workers. This chapter thus focuses on these workers and presents the general question and argument of the book regarding their alienation and agency. In doing so, it gives an outline of the way the platform economy is organized, and this constitutes the foundation for how this book categorizes and approaches different platforms. It looks at these from two perspectives: the nature of the platform and the nature of the work. By engaging with various strands of literature, it identifies its two case studies of location-based traditional time-wage Amazon warehouse workers and web-based piece-wage Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) gig workers. This chapter underlines how the contrast between these two case studies, which differing both in their nature of the platform and the nature of the work, can provide insights into their repercussions for their workers and their agency, shedding further light on the continuities and novelties of the world of work(ers). The chapter concludes by sketching out the book’s structure.
Historicizing Three Generations of Platforms
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the perspective of capital, which is crucial to grasp the world of labor, as capital–labor relations operate in relation to the wider co-evolving context. It traces and analyzes the organic development of the platform economy in relation to the political–economic, social and technological conditions. Grounded within the neoliberal context, in which venture capital (VC) and Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) fueled the growth of the platform economy, this chapter identifies three specific generations of platforms. The first one is traced back to the dot-com era in the 1990s, evolving from the creation and wider dissemination of the Internet. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, technological conditions resulted in a more user-friendly Internet while political–economic conditions pushed second-generation platforms to search for a new source of financial capital. As changes in the wider conditions also bring about changes in the platform economy, I finally look at the third-generation platforms that erupted after the economic crisis of 2006–8. This chapter ultimately demonstrates that each kind of platform, with its own way of organizing workers, has organically developed in relation to the wider conditions within capitalist temporality. The platform economy is not separate from, but part of, the larger economy.
Contextualizing Amazon’s Growing Empire
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

Moving on from the larger historical development of the platform economy, this chapter focuses on contextualizing Amazon’s expansion and platforms within this larger trajectory. Amazon spreads its roots across the platform economy, becoming foundational to it and making it increasingly difficult not to encounter Amazon in one way or another while using the Internet. This chapter traces its development within the larger platform economy from its establishment in the 1990s to the monopoly it has grown into today. Focusing mainly on the perspective of capital, this chapter underlines the dimensions of Amazon’s growing and expanding ecosystem. It highlights how Amazon has organically created platforms across all three generations in relation to the wider context in which these are situated. It especially focuses on its e-commerce platform and digital labor platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, as these constitute the focus for the later investigation of the world of workers. Amazon is increasingly regarded as a trendsetter for other platforms and industries, holding repercussions and implications within and possibly beyond the platform economy.
Cog in the Machine: Working the Amazon Circulation Line
Authors: Kassem Sarrah
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on humanizing the backbone of Amazon – the manual labor that circulates commodities sold via the platform in the warehouses. This chapter dives, therefore, into the first of the two case studies as an example of a location-based traditional time-wage platform. It examines this manual labor on the shop floor, reminiscent of factories in the industrial era yet brought into the 21st century, and analyzes the four relations of alienation: from the labor activity, from the product of labor, from species-being and from fellow humans. The organization of these warehouses reflects Taylorist techniques of scientific management that monitor and control every step of the labor process. Although workers have a set hourly wage, and are not paid piece rate, the pace of their labor is dictated by an enforced Units Per Hour (UPH) regime of productivity rates. The possibility of both social and technological surveillance, as a result of being within a single physical location, ensures a docile and (also algorithmically) disciplined workforce to keep up with the ever-increasing demand and expansions of the corporation. As Amazon reproduces many trends on the labor market from Taylorization common in production lines to the work culture similar in many platforms, it pushes these to new dimensions.
Class and Contention: Social Movement Studies and Labour Studies
Authors: Porta Donatella della , Chesta Riccardo Emilio , Cini Lorenzo
Published: September 2023

The first chapter provides a critical review of the relevant literature in the fields of social movement studies and industrial relations on the issues of capitalist transformations, workers’ collective voice and identity formation in the digital era by highlighting their points of tensions and of interaction. In this way, the core arguments of the chapter are linked to the debates in social movement studies as well as industrial relations. More notably, we argue that in order to make sense of the new labour conflicts in the platform economy it is necessary to build an analytical framework which draws upon and combines concepts and theories developed in both fields of studies. We do so by discussing the most recent theoretical frameworks that have been put forward and assessing their contribution to the understanding of the current revival of reflections on class and capitalism, as well as the mobilization of labour.
Labour Conflicts in the Digital Age: Some Conclusions
Authors: Porta Donatella della , Chesta Riccardo Emilio , Cini Lorenzo
Published: September 2023

Summarizing the empirical results of the research and discussing our main theoretical achievements for the explanation of the new mobilizations of platform workers, Chapter 6 provides several arguments as to why a renewed social movement approach is key for understanding and explaining the new labour conflicts in the digital context. More specifically, we revisit the three core frames of references presented in the introductory chapter. On the bases of our empirical evidence we then suggest theoretical reflections aimed at combining the attention to structural conditions of conflicts, workers’ agency, and organizational dynamics, as well as the emergent power of eventful protests. In this way, we also single out the contribution that comes from the bridging of social movement studies and industrial relations studies. The chapter then highlights how our contribution sheds light on the specific characteristics of work affected by the new technological transformation as well as the mechanisms that trigger new collective identities and mobilization processes for workers. Finally, the conclusions bridges labour studies and social movement studies with debates on the rise of a new digital working class (cybertariat, info-proletariat, digital proletariat) making sense of processes of class mobilization that concerns the new precarious workers in general.
Fostering Developmental Guardianship: The Case of Myanmar’s Tatmadaw
Authors: Priamarizki Adhi
Published: September 2023

This chapter explains the return of the Tatmadaw at the helm of government in Myanmar as well as the military’s involvement in COVID-19 management and exploitation to preserve its interests. One element that previous studies have not yet discussed to explain the phenomenon is the influence of doctrinal belief of the Tatmadaw, which is heavily inspired by the developmental guardianship idea. The developmental guardianship thinking has driven the Tatmadaw’s return to politics as the military aims to maintain its centrality. Moreover, the global outbreak of COVID-19 galvanized the military’s position as the developmental guardian and justified expansive military involvement in non-defence affairs. The discussion on the role of the doctrinal element, in this case the developmental guardianship paradigm, is this chapter’s main contribution to the contemporary literature on military and politics in Myanmar.
Militarizing Governance: Informal Civil–Military Relations and Democratic Erosion in the Philippines
Authors: Arugay Aries A.
Published: September 2023

This chapter concentrates on addressing the following question: Is the Philippine military socially, politically and economically embedded to the point that civil–military relations cannot be viewed as a gap between civilian and military elements? It argues that the shift of the military’s original reformist stance favouring democratic civilian control towards a more politicized disposition can be explained by two interrelated structural factors. The first is the presence of informal institutions such as the militarization of civilian structures and the traditional reliance on the military regarding security matters. Their competing, substitutive and latent nature profoundly provide political autonomy to the military despite the presence of formal civilian control guaranteed by laws and institutions. The second factor is the erosion of the country’s democratic regime instigated by a populist leader. The chapter discusses how the interaction of these two structural factors influenced the current civil–military imbalance based on different sources, including an original survey of members of the Philippine strategic community comprising uniformed personnel from the country’s security sector as well as government officials, researchers and academics representing the civilian sector. This non-random elite survey reveals the polarized perceptions and evaluations of the respondents on the state of civil–military relations under Duterte.
Mind the Gap: The Curious Case of Everyday Civil–Military Relations in Singapore
Authors: Chang Jun Yan , Ho Shu Huang
Published: September 2023

This chapter argues that there is no civil–military gap – a key concern in civil–military relations scholarship – in Singapore, transcending the civil–military problematique. While the military naturally plays a different role, it does not occupy a different world. Singapore presents a curious case of how its military evolution has been embedded within the operational role of the SAF as opposed to a changing relationship between different worlds. While this edited volume highlights Asian militaries can indeed slowly evolve to defuse disputes between themselves and civilian leaders within Asian democracies to achieve developmental and security goals more synergistically, Singapore is different from this novel conception of the study of civil–military relations. The SAF was already structured at its inception to minimize such disputes and maximize efficiency in reaching national goals. It was an institution designed to fit in with, and not stand apart from, civilian governance. The influence of Singapore’s colonial legacy and how the SAF is embedded socially and politically situates the argument. The chapter concludes by emphasizing that Singapore’s civil–military relations need to be understood in terms of the ‘everyday’ transition between military and civilian roles by members of the SAF.
The Stubborn Illiberalism and Trialectical Dynamics of Thailand’s Civil–Military Relations
Authors: Raymond Gregory V.
Published: September 2023

This chapter posits that Western models of civil–military relations do not apply in Thailand for three key reasons. First, Thailand’s status as the sole uncolonized country of Southeast Asia has allowed greater continuity with its pre-colonial era political philosophies than in many other states. The end of the absolute monarchy in 1932, in particular, did not extinguish precolonial ideas of kingship and social order. Today, the division between the military and civilians is less important than a hierarchy that places kharatchakan (servants of the king) above businesspeople or other professions, and the military higher than other public servants. Second, visible aspirations for liberal and egalitarian forms of government have been exhibited by disenfranchised groups whose demands for participation in governance have increased over time. Third, the shift in power in international politics, away from the West towards other centres of power, including illiberal and authoritarian states, is reducing the pressure on Thailand to undertake liberal democratic reforms. For these three reasons, this chapter proposes a ‘trialectical’ framework for Thai civil–military relations. While Thailand remains a hybrid state, in which democratic forces continue to wrestle with traditional elites, they are not yet strong enough to force change towards liberal democratic politics.
Image Makeover: The Military Evolution of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces
Authors: Heng Yee-Kuang
Published: September 2023

Although Article 9 of Japan’s constitution states that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be sustained”, yet, Tokyo maintains one of the most capable military forces in the Asia-Pacific. The chapter evaluates the enhanced visible profile that the late Abe Shinzo’s administration sought in deploying the JSDF overseas on defence diplomacy and HADR missions to persuade and in the process, (re-)acclimatize the public to its important existence. The chapter also examines publicity campaigns that attempted to justify and endear the JSDF to the public. The focus on ‘endearing’ the JSDF to the public through popular anime cartoon characters for instance appears somewhat unique in the region, contrasting with concern about the authoritarian nature of military control over past Japanese politics or its role in developmental societies. At the same time, this more light-hearted focus on cartoon characters co-exists with a serious underlying message that the JSDF is increasingly necessary as the regional security environment deteriorates rapidly.
Alternative Economies
Authors: Martell Luke
Published: September 2023

Chapter 1 examines the alternative of communism, in theory and attempts in practice. Lessons from attempts at communism are drawn out for alternative economies and social experiments in capitalism. The chapter moves from society-wide collective ownership to co-operative ownership on a small scale within capitalism. It discusses the principles and benefits of co-ops and the challenges they encounter. There is a discussion of Cooperation Jackson in the US. The chapter discusses participatory economy proposals for self-management, remuneration, mixed job combinations, and collective self-planning of the economy. It covers alternatives to this, for abolishing work, an economy without money, and decisions about the economy according to pull rather than plan. The chapter discusses examples of participatory budgeting internationally, and communal democracy in Barcelona (Spain), Fatsa (Turkey), Marinaleda (Spain), and Chiapas (Mexico). The chapter also looks at proposals for a society with less paid work and slow society, including their benefits, practicalities, and challenges. It moves on to eco-localist and confederalist alternatives, including in the Global South, post-development, degrowth, bioregionalism, permaculture, transition towns, and social ecology in Rojava (Syria). The chapter discusses digital alternatives to surveillance capitalism and proposals for a democratic public media.
The Democratic Economy
Authors: Martell Luke
Published: September 2023

Chapter 5 discusses democratizing the economy, including alternatives from the ‘populist’ Left and the COVID and post-COVID periods that involve collective ownership and control. The chapter supports democratic socialism over social democracy, and a focus on pre-distribution and asset ownership as well as redistribution of income. It outlines community wealth building, which favours social ownership, social goals, and local wealth retention, and provides examples in places like Preston and Cleveland. Community wealth building is outlined as an approach that involves a circulatory rather than extractive economy. The challenge of ensuring participatory consciousness is addressed. The chapter discusses methods for responding to resistance that democratizing the economy would encounter. It looks at the scaling up of local initiatives and the allying of civil society and local politics with national politics, in multilevel socialism. The chapter also outlines the role of society-wide public ownership, arguing that it needs to be inclusive of multiple groups and democratic, making the case for central planning, raised as a possibility out of the COVID-19 period, under popular democratic control.
Ethical Systems (2016)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

Chapter 8 sketches four ethical systems of contemporary interest. Two of them lend themselves to universalizing claims, one urging right conduct and the other counselling good behaviour. Together they support liberal modernity without due consideration of the functional arrangements undergirding modernity’s modernist moment. Postmodern ethics is implicitly situational and half-heartedly systematic. Lately subject to much discussion is virtue ethics—an ancient ethical tradition identified most of all with Aristotle. At the centre of virtue ethics are the four cardinal virtues (wisdom or prudence, courage, justice, seemliness), all demanding self-control. The status concerns identified in the preceding chapter link social conditions to self-control and virtuous conduct to standing in society. When virtues become duties, the result is an ethical system better suited to the challenges that an overextended modernity faces in the decades ahead.
Writing Large (2000)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

Chapter 9 is a tribute to James Rosenau. It reviews Rosenau’s conception of theory, the echoes of David Hume’s sceptical voice in Rosenau’s defence of Enlightenment values, and Rosenau’s commitment to the methods of modern science, before turning to his influential book, Turbulence in World Politics (1990), which documents a significant shift in Rosenau’s theoretical concerns. Turbulence defeats easy claims about causation and undercuts generalization. For Rosenau, the cumulative impact of turbulence is transformative—an epochal change in the contours of modernity. ‘Writ large’, an aggregate of local changes indicates a global contest between mindless habit and adaptive behaviour. Yet Rosenau failed to free himself from the habitual language of Enlightened politics—a universalizing language inadequate to the contest between never-squelched tradition and overweening modernity. In that contest, incivility, calumny and wilful ignorance have since become the norm.
Intertextual Relations (2009)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

The editors of a modest Danish journal (no longer published) commissioned essays for a project imaginatively called ‘The Nines’. They had noticed that major statements of international theory appeared in the ninth year of most decades in the last century. 1989 was the year Friedrich Kratochwil published Rule, Norms and Decisions, and the author published World of Our Making—books largely responsible for launching constructivism in the field of International Relations. That same year saw publication of a symposium volume, called International/Intertextual Relations, staking out a poststructuralist stance for the field. For poststructuralists, the world is a text subject to as many readings as there are readers; there is no grand narrative. For the author, every text is embedded in a story; modernity is a grand narrative; the volume gets a sympathetic if critical reading.
What We Do (2018)
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: September 2023

A conference spotlight offered the author an opportunity to talk to budding scholars in the field of International Relations about the demands and delights of scholarship as craft. These remarks were much influenced by the author’s collaboration with two wide-ranging, dedicated and accomplished scholars in editing the SAGE Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations, where this essay first appeared. Because the field is so caught up in the disputes over the claims of science, we as scholars have lost sight of craft as the key to what we do. The essays tack twice tack from the history of the field to large philosophical concerns, and then to the field’s sociological features. What we do most of the time is talk (and read, and write) about our models, values and skills.
Theorizing the Immobility Turn
Authors: Cairns David , Clemente Mara
Published: September 2023

In Chapter 2 the authors elaborate at a theoretical level on the immobility turn that has accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. Significantly, they note that the immobility turn is not just a product of the pandemic, but also a reflection of the limitations of the preceding period of expansion and multiplication of mobilities, not least of which is the impact of expanded levels of international travel on the environment. Also evident are ethical complications arising from a desire to exercise an entitlement to unrestricted international travel at times when the freedom to circulate has been temporarily suspended by measures aimed at protecting public health. This debate is discussed in terms of the sociological idea of moral economy, noting the difficulty of maintaining a counter-hegemonic discourse on free movement.
From Overtourism to Undertourism, and Back Again
Authors: Cairns David , Clemente Mara
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 looks at tourism before the COVID-19 pandemic and during its first two years, using evidence from stakeholders in the Portuguese tourism industry that focuses on recent issues alongside more long-standing challenges relating to sustainability. To contextualize these developments, the authors adapt two pre-existing theoretical ideas. The first, overtourism, relates to high levels of expansion in international tourism in the pre-pandemic era, while the second, undertourism, refers to problems arising from low or declining visitor numbers. Through mobilization of these ideas, the authors are able to locate the findings of their research in recognizable conceptual frameworks and, from these vantage points, argue that many of the issues that became visible during the pandemic are in fact the product of pre-existing problems, including an apparent lack of regulation in the expansion of international tourism.
International Student Mobility and Immobility
Authors: Cairns David , Clemente Mara
Published: September 2023

The international circulation of higher education students expanded in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This meant that during the pandemic universities faced challenges in maintaining the integrity of international study programmes and supporting large numbers of fee-paying student migrants. In this chapter, focusing on the Portuguese context, the authors note that programmes like Erasmus were also potentially compromised by the lack of opportunities to engage in convivial activities during the successive lockdowns, limiting the capacity to generate intercultural competencies. However, students who had migrated for the duration of a degree course benefited from more settled status, helping to explain why student migration increased in Portugal at a time when other forms of student mobility declined. Other issues include the challenge of moving learning online, and the future prospects for virtual mobility.
Mobility after an Immobility Turn
Authors: Cairns David , Clemente Mara
Published: September 2023

The final chapter of this book returns to debates about the meaning of mobility and the ramifications of temporary suspensions of the freedom to move during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This disruption created imaginative challenges, making people think more critically about non-essential mobility, as well as practical problems, particularly in industries that had to cope with prolonged disruptions and where there was also a need to balance public safety concerns with economic imperatives. The authors interpret these debates as indicative of a change in our culture of mobility, once perceived as benign or even beneficial, now seen as something to be consumed more selectively and perhaps sustainably. The difficulties in restarting full-scale mobility also lead the authors to ponder the viability of alternate modes of travel, including the prospects for an expansion of the practice of digital nomadism.
The Right to Education: A Battle Still to Be Won
Authors: Revillard Anne
Published: September 2023

This chapter revisits the distinction between special and inclusive education by distinguishing type of schooling, accommodations available, and changes in teaching formats. This framework is then used to analyse the reception of the gradual shift towards a promotion of mainstream schooling in France. In terms of policy reception, the comparison between different generations reveals an objective effect of the promotion of mainstream schooling on educational trajectories (where one is schooled) and expectations (what one subjectively values). Yet the narratives also show the major obstacles to a full realization of the right to inclusion, and the very active role of students and families to overcome them.
Rights at Work
Authors: Revillard Anne
Published: September 2023

In France as elsewhere, disabled people suffer from structural marginalization in the labour market. Employment-related disability rights crystallize the ambivalence of disability policies: between an assumed inability to work that entitles people to benefits and the promotion of workforce participation; and between sheltered employment, quotas, and anti-discrimination. Employment might therefore appear to be the area where disability rights are the most fragile. The chapter shows, on the contrary, how this coexistence of divergent orientations can be analysed as their strong point, potentially opening more opportunities for individuals. After a review of the history of disability policies in the field of employment, the chapter analyses how disabled people negotiate a marginal place in the labour market, in dynamics that combine structural inequalities and the reception of public policies. It then focuses on the effects and appropriations of the flagship measure in this domain, the quota scheme.
Political Autonomy, the Arab Spring and Anonymous
Authors: Bellaby Ross W.
Published: September 2023

This chapter will focus on operations whose purpose is concerned with political autonomy: that is, restoring, protecting or enabling the individual’s and social group’s ability to act with their autonomy intact and to use that autonomy to act as political beings. This includes operations whose objective is providing for people’s rights in expression, association, access to information and political engagement, and, importantly, how cyberspace has come to play a fundamental role in each of their realizations. Some of the most infamous examples of hacking operations in this area involve those carried out as part of the Arab Spring revolutions between 2010 and 2012, where Anonymous aided the emerging protest movements throughout the region by shutting down government websites through distributed-denial of services (DDoS) attacks, and helping dissidents circumvent online censorship by providing ‘online care packages’ that allowed anonymous online communication and access to information. This chapter argues for the pivotal role cyberspace has come to play in the realization of people’s vital interests in autonomy, privacy and liberty, and their ability to engage as political entities. It then details the role of hacker collectives such as Anonymous in the Arab Spring revolutions by facilitating the resistance movements’ ability to communicate and organize, as well as the hacker’s attacks against state infrastructure. It will argue that even given the damage and harm the hacker’s operations caused, restoring the widespread and significant loss of online rights can justify their intervention.
Correcting the Failure of the State
Authors: Bellaby Ross W.
Published: September 2023

This chapter expands the debate from informational rights to look at non-cyber, non-information related threats, including when the state and its representatives fail to, first, provide and enact good laws equally and fairly, including the failure to apply fair processes, equal treatment, misapplying laws, and lacking the ability and political will to enforce the good laws; or second, when the state develops unjustifiably harmful laws, policies, procedures or institutional cultures. It will argue that in both instances, given the failure of the state and the subsequent threat these failures represent, hackers can use political violence to defend people from harm, though the type of response must be matched to the threat posed. This chapter will look at police brutality; the failure of due and fair process; the development of laws that seek to directly discriminate and foster hatred and violence against members of the LGBTQ+ community; and the locating and unmasking of online paedophiles.
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Authors: Densley James , Mclean Robert , Brick Carlton
Published: September 2023

This chapter documents how people migrate from ‘hub’ cities to ‘county’ sites not just at the direction of gang leaders, but for personal, family reasons. The chapter thus demonstrates, following Maxson’s (1998) work in the US, how crime opportunities and drug market expansion may be secondary motivations for gang proliferation and gang member migration. The chapter explores how two unrelated domestic issues created the opportunity and incentive for our interviewees to ‘go county’. The findings thus challenge some of the standard story about the strategic origins of county lines drugs networks.
End of the Line
Authors: Densley James , Mclean Robert , Brick Carlton
Published: September 2023

This chapter documents in vivid detail, the problem of violence in county lines and the events leading up to the end of the line in A-Town. The findings show that big-city gangs do not always supplant or subsume local parochial drug dealers; instead, they may have to learn to live with them. County lines drugs networks may be regulated by violence, but again, too much violence is bad for business, and if events away in the county sites threaten the gang at home in the hub, the gang will cut ties in the interests of self-preservation.
County Lines in a Therapy
Authors: Densley James , Mclean Robert , Brick Carlton
Published: September 2023

This chapter summarizes key findings from Contesting County Lines, such as: people migrate from ‘hub’ cities to ‘county’ sites not just at the direction of gang leaders, but for personal, family reasons; adults who have some existing ties to the ‘county’ areas, even local relationships within them, are chiefly responsible for the logistics on the ground; technology does not necessarily drive social change in drug markets, and mobile phones may not always make drug dealing easier; big-city gangs do not always supplant or subsume local parochial drug dealers, but rather learn to compromise; and some people enter into county lines of their own volition, fully embracing a life of deviant entrepreneurship. We conclude with a critical assessment of the county lines standard story, arguing that a medicalized view of the world and a well-meaning but narrow focus on ‘vulnerability’ and victimhood has contributed to a form of concept creep that may be deleterious to efforts to prevent and prosecute county lines. Implications for future research, policy and practice are discussed.
Paradigms, Environmentalism, and Demography
Authors: Barnett Larry D.
Published: September 2023

The chapter points out that the current paradigm of environmentalists ignores the negative impact that human population size has on the biosphere. To counter this lack of concern with population size and growth, the chapter uses graphs to show that the ecological footprint of the global human population has appreciably expanded since the 1960s; that the numerical increase of the global population remains substantial even though the rate of population growth and the total fertility rate have fallen; and that large numbers of human beings are projected to be added each decade to the global population until at least the year 2050.
Government Efforts to Change the Frequency of Childbearing and Immigration
Authors: Barnett Larry D.
Published: September 2023

The chapter discusses some methodological pitfalls in assessments of the effectiveness of law and government policy that address society-important social activities. A summary and analysis of quantitative research indicates that law and policy, including policy promoting family-planning services, have had just a limited impact on the frequency of childbearing. Research also indicates that law and policy have not had a large effect on the incidence of abortion or on the volume of immigration.
Archives in Blue: Visual Registers for the Police Siege and Surveillance of Jaguar Productions in the 1970s
Authors: Freibert Finley
Published: September 2023

abstract: The largest non-filmic archives of the Los Angeles–based gay pornography studio Jaguar Productions are records of the company's policing under anti-gay legal regimes outlawing sodomy and obscenity. Given that such archives hold the bulk of extant records on Jaguar, state abuse not only affected the history of Jaguar but now also affects the historiographic process for making sense of what happened to the company. Archives of policing incriminate law enforcement in the production of anti-gay visual records. These law enforcement records were ultimately forged out of bigoted aims to destroy gay solidarity and community infrastructures.
"As the Cyber World Turns": Web Soaps and the History of TV Storytelling Online
Authors: Levine Elana
Published: September 2023

abstract: This article examines the history of the web soap, serialized, fictional programming distributed online and associated with the US daytime television soap opera. I locate its origins in the mid-1990s and document its development in three subsequent periods: the convergence of soaps and the internet between 2000 and 2007, the web soap's expansion between 2008 and 2013, and the marginalization of soaps post-2013. The web soap helped to shape the economic and narrative possibilities for streaming TV but has been supplanted by the higher-profile fare it helped make possible, repeating gendered patterns of cultural value that have long accompanied television.
Recent Work
Authors: Kendrick Elise
Published: September 2023

Abstract: An art signature featuring both portraits and linocut artwork by Elise Kendrick. Her artwork centers Black figures in multidimensional ways, using both vibrant colors and high contrast black and white.
A Web of Support: A Critical Narrative Analysis of Black Women's Relationships in STEM Disciplines
Authors: Wicker Paris , McCoy Dorian L. , Winkle-Wagner Rachelle , Barnes Imani
Published: September 2023

Abstract: While nearly half (40%) of Black students leave STEM disciplines, and racialized and gendered social and environmental factors play a role in STEM pathways of Black women, less known is how relationships and critical social capital facilitate undergraduate STEM success. Using a critical narrative approach, we explored how strong relationships at Spelman College helped Black women thrive in STEM degree programs at HBCUs and beyond. Findings focused on three out of 105 narratives suggest that Black women strategically created dynamic webs of support that included families, faculty, and administrators in and out of STEM disciplines, often leading to increased opportunities and a greater likelihood of persistence.
High-speed nonlinear frequency sweeping signal distance extraction algorithm based on the table lookup method
Authors: Bao Ruijia , Yu Zhenxin , Fu Xiao , Duan Fajie , Liu Wenzheng , Guo Guanghui
Published: September 2023

In the domain of frequency sweeping interferometry, the accurate
extraction of distance information from nonlinear frequency scanning
signals holds paramount significance in ensuring meticulous
measurements of high precision. This paper presents a novel, to the
best of our knowledge, high-speed distance extraction algorithm based
on the table lookup method and validates its feasibility through
theoretical models, simulations, and practical experiments. The
proposed algorithm achieves comparable accuracy to traditional methods
involving resampling and Hilbert transform. However, it outperforms
them in robustness against noise and variations in sampling points.
This method can accurately process signals sampled even below the
Nyquist sampling rate. The simplicity and computational efficiency of
the proposed approach make it suitable for various nonlinear sampling
applications, promising broad applicability in scientific and
engineering contexts.
Pure-quartic Bragg solitons in chip-scale nonlinear integrated circuits
Authors: Choi Juwon , Sohn Byoung-Uk , Sahin Ezgi , Chen George F. R. , Xing Peng , Ng Doris K. T. , Eggleton Benjamin J. , Tan Dawn T. H.
Published: September 2023

Pure-quartic solitons have gained significant attention recently due to their ability to achieve higher energy than classical solitons for short pulse durations, leveraging the interaction between self-phase modulation and anomalous fourth-order dispersion. However, challenges in generating the required dispersion profile and the scarcity of sufficiently low-loss devices with high nonlinearity and negligible nonlinear loss have restricted experimental progress. In this paper, we report a class of pure-quartic Bragg solitons that balances self-phase modulation and the ultra-strong Bragg-grating-induced negative fourth-order dispersion in combination with negligible group velocity dispersion and negligible third-order dispersion. We demonstrate pure-quartic Bragg soliton-effect compression of 2.4× in a compact millimeter-scale integrated low-loss and highly nonlinear waveguide circuit. Our findings show the potential of exploiting the exceptional dispersion profile of nonlinear Bragg gratings for advanced soliton generation and pulse shaping, particularly the advantageous energy scaling and associated compression of pure-quartic solitons.
Near-term pregnant women in the Dominican Republic experience high rates of Group B Streptococcus rectovaginal colonization with virulent strains
Authors: Laycock Katherine M. , Acosta Francia , Valera Sandra , Villegas Ana , Mejia Elia , Mateo Christian , Felipe Rosa , Fernández Anabel , Job Megan , Dongas Sophia , Steenhoff Andrew P. , Ratner Adam J. , Geoghegan Sarah
Published: September 2023

Maternal colonization with Group B Streptococcus (GBS) is an important cause of stillbirth, prematurity, and serious infection and death in infants worldwide. Resource constraints limit prevention strategies in many regions. Maternal GBS vaccines in development could be a more accessible prevention strategy, but data on geographic variations in GBS clones are needed to guide development of a broadly effective vaccine. In the Dominican Republic (DR), limited data suggest that pregnant women experience GBS colonization at rates among the highest globally. We aimed to determine the prevalence of maternal rectovaginal GBS colonization and describe clonal characteristics of colonizing strains in the DR. A cross-sectional study assessed rectovaginal GBS colonization in 350 near-term pregnant women presenting for routine prenatal care at an urban tertiary center in the DR. Rectovaginal samples were tested with chromogenic Strep B Carrot Broth and cultured for confirmatory whole-genome sequencing. In a secondary analysis, participants’ demographics and histories were assessed for association with GBS colonization. Rectovaginal GBS colonization occurred in 26.6% of women. Serotypes Ia, Ib, II, III, IV, and V were detected, with no one serotype predominating; serotype III was identified most frequently (21.5%). Virulent and emerging strains were common, including CC17 (15.1%) and ST1010 (17.2%). In this first characterization of maternal GBS serotypes in the DR, we found high rates of rectovaginal colonization including with virulent and emerging GBS strains. The serotypes observed here are all targeted by candidate hexavalent GBS vaccines, suggesting effective protection in the DR.