bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Governing the Crisis at the Zimbabwe–South Africa Border through Humanitarian Interventions
Authors: Vanyoro Kudakwashe
Published: October 2024

This chapter argues that humanitarian activities have transformed the Zimbabwe–South Africa border into a space that is aligned with current and dominant migration governance practices and official discourses that emphasise migrant management, categorisation and containment. Indeed, it would be unfair to suggest that these are deliberate attempts, or that the assemblage of transit shelters in Musina forms part of a consistent assemblage of governance together with the formal state. However, it is clear in this assessment that attempts to administer their work in a technical and administrative manner enhances some humanitarian workers’ autonomy over migrants’ lives in ways that maintain the legitimacy of the bureaucratic state and its logics of classifying people as insiders and outsiders, victims and agents. This analysis pushes us to view immobilities as part of a broader typology of power that represents a novel way for humanitarian institutions to manage the lives of migrants. In the context of this book, it is important in showing the importance of going beyond binaries of state–non-state African border studies’ understanding of sovereignty, particularly when considering the role of moral sentiments, like discourse, in the conduct of conduct.
New Punctums, Proto-Perceptions, and Animated Entanglements
Authors: Sampson Tony D.
Published: October 2024

This article takes up Jenkins’ (2013) suggestion of a need to learn from, but ultimately expand on, Barthes’s concept of the punctum to describe a new kind of impersonal affective experience of animation. This is a complex theoretical move, nonetheless, since although Barthes goes beyond a linguistic reading of still images, and points instead to experiences based on intensity, he distances his punctum from moving images. Following affect theory, this discussion similarly begins by substituting symbolic consumption for a process wherein presubjective experience readies the way for the potential of a movement event to trigger subjective responses. Furthermore, it makes the case that the affective registering of the image might help grasp how Barthes’s ideological tricks work their magical influence on experience beyond symbolic ideas-in-form. In conclusion, then, the new punctum does not present a phenomenological relation established between the form of the image (still or moving), and the ideological mind, but instead offers a nonphenomenological experience of a material entanglement with animation.
Enclaves of Differentiated Labour
Authors: Alberti Gabriella , Sacchetto Devi
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on the labour process in global production with attention to Export Processing Zones where migrant labour is subject to highly exploitative control regimes that limit the free movement of workers. The authors show how in these critical zones, the heterogeneity of labour supplies and its racialization and genderization are key mechanisms for the disempowerment of workers as well as the control of their mobility. They propose the notion of Enclaves of Differentiated Labour (EDL) to encapsulate how labour is spatially regimented and divided under specific regulatory regimes, and how the state allows for the disparaging of labour standards. While special economic zones in the Global South are the most significant examples of EDL, similar dynamics of migrant worker control and resistance emerge in different production contexts in the Global North. Drawing from a wide range of studies on migrant workers, the authors revise the notions of worker power considered in Chapter 1, rethinking the turnover of migrant labour as migrant labour mobility power and arguing that both work effort bargaining and mobility effort bargaining (Smith, 2006) constitute forms of individual and collective exit, leveraging power inside and outside the workplace, with important consequences for migrants’ working lives.
The Field of Social Reproduction
Authors: Alberti Gabriella , Sacchetto Devi
Published: October 2024

This chapter shifts the attention to the realm of workers’ social reproduction to understand the power of labour mobility. The authors draw from research on dormitory labour regimes and on feminist approaches to transnational migration to establish migration itself as a strategy of social reproduction, but also of labour subsumption. Feminist research has shown how reproductive activities are interlinked with labour processes through various capital strategies including wage reduction; control of workers beyond the formal working time; and home work. The authors explore how these modes of incorporation of social reproduction map onto the terrain of labour migration and how the high turnover of labour through migration partly disrupts these processes of value generation. Considering the role of transnational families and migrant social networks in cheapening costs for employers, and the strategic use of welfare vis-à-vis its differential access for non-citizens, the chapter concludes with a focus on worker dormitories as paradigmatic sites of value extraction and the seclusion of migrant bodies. It identifies four different functions of dormitories as key forms of control of migrant social reproductive practices and the ambivalent effects that they have in increasing or decreasing the associational power of migrant workers.
Ethical Weaving: Creative Narrations of Family Trauma and Resilience
Authors: Aayeshah Wajeehah
Published: October 2024

Working on a creative research narrative of your own family is challenging, especially if it includes memories of war, forced migration, grief and resilience. How do you illustrate a multifaceted representation of your parents when your short story is about one life-threatening event? How do you ask interview questions, knowing it always affects your loved ones? This chapter explores two challenges involved in developing the author’s creative graphic narrative book. These include the impact of telling untellable stories and the dilemma of ‘ethical’ data collection with family members.Based on the author’s experiences writing a graphic novel about the effect of events of 1971, when East Pakistan became Bangladesh and her Urdu-speaking family migrated to West Pakistan, this chapter draws upon Marianne Hirsch’s discussion around post-memory, and Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s approach towards post-amnesia to discuss complex memory work. The chapter also discusses the toll of emotional labour, intergenerational trauma, and strength through reflections on this creative project.
Narrating Women’s Life Histories: Voice, Audience, Ethics
Authors: Diprose Rachael
Published: October 2024

Feminist researchers emphasise the ethical importance of co-production of knowledge with research participants. Sharing the narratives of participants, especially those from vulnerable or marginalised groups whose voices are often sidelined or silenced, is also an important, higher-order feminist ethical choice for advocacy and so other women can potentially find meaning and inspiration in the journeys of their peers. However, such research involves risks to participants that institutionalised informed consent processes assume can all be known at the onset and sufficiently explained, with decisions then resting solely with interlocuters on whether to proceed. Yet, these risks may not always be fully predictable, especially in an evolving digital era in which open-access storytelling and research translation shifts the audience from narrower academic readers to multiple publics. Risks are also heightened for participants from regions with a history of authoritarianism where their narratives of challenging established power structures may attract the attention of those with the authority and influence to do them harm. Ethical narrative research thus, this chapter argues, entails balancing the interests and wishes of protagonists with the short- and long-term risks to these interlocuters through iterative reflection, consultation and collaborative (and sometimes revised) decision-making involving both researchers and participants.
Narrative Next: Ways Forward for Narrative Research
Authors: Barnwell Ashley , Ravn Signe
Published: October 2024

The concluding chapter draws together the themes of the book and offers new paths forward for narrative research in new times. It summarises and demonstrates how the chapters have each brought new interdisciplinary dimensions to the key questions of the book around the ethics of storytelling, voice, power and representation. The closing discussion opens up avenues for future analysis primarily around the question of how scholars can bring critical perspectives to the promise of stories, without becoming too cynical about the power of narrating lived experience. It identifies further issues around time and temporality, the role of the listener, authority and tellability that call for the expertise of narrative scholars and socially engaged storytellers in our era.
Warp and Weft
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores what sound tells us about spatial and temporal experience both within and beyond the walls. What does sound tell us about yearning for other times, people and places. A passage from fieldnotes describes the particular soundscape and emotions in the visits hall, before considering what this tells us about the absence of certain sounds, and aspects of social life in the broader prison.
Weft and Warp
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

This chapter considers the relationship between sound, space and time, and the textures of emotional geography in different parts of the prison. Sound is a modality of emotion, offering useful instruction in the climate of the day, prompting consideration of how people carve out spaces of sanctuary in these stark places.
Disentangling Power and Order
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

Focusing on the soundscape allowed for an understanding grounded amid community life. Power and order are frequently conflated in prisons literature, but listening revealed how understanding is obfuscated by this process and erroneous assumptions are made about the basis for order.
Listening to Power
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

Attending to the soundscape revealed nuance and complexity to flows of power and their sonic contestations. The intensity of the environment and tenuous nature of goodwill are explored, before an elaborated account of banging and what this tells us about flows of power is considered.
Access to Digital Justice
Authors: Creutzfeldt Naomi , Kyprianides Arabella , Bradford Ben , Jackson Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Chapter 7, Access to Digital Justice, asks the central question: how accessible is online justice? This chapter explores how those who administer justice, those who provide advice and those who use the online justice system experience it. In doing so, we explore how the use of technology in the justice system is shaped by, and may reshape, people’s orientations and sensibilities towards law and technology. We use our data, in this chapter, to explore how consciousness of how people think and feel about the law relates to their capability of acting upon it.
Rhythmic Infrastructure
Authors: Addie Jean-Paul D.
Published: October 2024

This chapter expands on the formative ideas presented by Henri Lefebvre in Rhythmanalysis. It examines the concept of ‘rhythm’ as an analytic to illuminate and connect the multitude of times that permeate the city through infrastructure. The chapter begins by assessing how urban infrastructures and social difference are animated, experienced, and understood through rhythm as repetition. It then explores the production and regulation of often conflicting natural and social rhythmic cycles, paying particular attention to the circulation of infrastructure knowledge and policy. The chapter then forwards that notions of infrastructural rhythm can productively form the basis for periodization strategies to comparatively analyse urban change. It is argued that engaging rhythmic temporal modalities is significant because how we think about infrastructure time profoundly shapes our understanding of urbanization and urban life. It is therefore a political act with the potential to reimagine and enact more progressive urban futures.
Usable Infrastructure Pasts: Mobilizing History for Urban Technology Futures
Authors: Moss Timothy
Published: October 2024

While scholars and policymakers alike brood over the opportunities and uncertainties surrounding infrastructure futures, the past provides a rich source of inspiration that is waiting to be tapped. The ‘temporal turn’ in critical infrastructure studies advocated by this book needs to include new and different histories of urban technology. This chapter applies the concept of ‘usable pasts’ to uncover what kinds of history can be used productively and how infrastructure pasts can be rendered valuable in addressing today’s global challenges. The chapter defines and conceptualizes what usable pasts are, based on a wide-ranging literature review. It identifies and categorizes diverse types of usable infrastructure pasts, illustrated with examples from Berlin’s rich history of urban technology. Finally, it explores ways of mobilizing usable pasts of urban infrastructure to generative effect today. Overall, the chapter demonstrates critical and constructive ways of thinking with history, rather than just about history, when considering infrastructure futures.
The Times of Infrastructure Fundamentalism: Future Profits, Slow Operations, Long-Term Impacts
Authors: Schindler Seth , Kanai J. Miguel
Published: October 2024

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis precipitated the emergence of a consensus among policymakers surrounding the state’s role in spatial planning and infrastructure-led development. This chapter argues that the belief that infrastructure was the missing ingredient in earlier rounds of neoliberal restructuring constitutes an emerging ‘infrastructure fundamentalism’. This animates national development plans whose time horizons now routinely extend two or three decades into the future. This new infrastructure time has inhibited the efforts of international financial institutions (IFIs) to foster ‘blended finance’ because planning with such extended time horizons is inherently risky. The chapter demonstrate how IFIs have sought to standardize the distribution of economic, political, and environmental risk in an attempt to future-proof profits. Its analysis confirms that while significant risks remain unaccounted for, slow operations have been launched worldwide to extend commodity frontiers and integrate markets.
Dissonant Times: The Land–Infrastructure–Finance Nexus in Post-Mubarak Egypt
Authors: Wahdan Dalia , Elshayal Tamer
Published: October 2024

This chapter questions the resurgence of mega-infrastructure projects in Egypt amid dire fiscal, political, economic, and pandemic conditions. It focuses on the temporal relations underpinning the ‘territorial moment’ of Egypt’s infrastructure-led development, including the restructuring of public agencies; the expedited time frames granted to key projects; the temporal extension of credit and risk involved in the assetization and floating of financial instruments; and the underlying logics of a de-risking state. The case of the Cairo Monorail illustrates an emergent land–infrastructure–finance nexus that produces temporal, spatial, and scalar dissonances surrounding de-risking investments. This results in the restructuring of governmental institutions as well as the reconfiguration of urban spaces and temporalities. The chapter argues that by engaging with urban infrastructure almost exclusively as a temporally risk weighted asset, Egypt and the specialized financiers who inform its post-Mubarak urban development trajectory are constructing a dissonant and inequitable urban future.
Introduction
Authors: Peterson Jesse D. , Dekker Natashe Lemos , Olson Philip R.
Published: October 2024

We introduce the context of the edited volume, describing its interdisciplinary focus, its immediate connection to death and dying, and how this volume came to be. We position the volume in the field of death studies, pointing out how the volume underscores the relationality of death by articulating new forms of deathly concern that situate death, and human relationships to it in more-than-human terms. The volume brings these marginal matters into focus, centring discussion of the death of nonhuman others, the relational materiality of the human corpse, new narratives about the work of death caretakers, and newly emerging practices and technologies. By shedding light on deaths and dyings that exist in unlooked-for places, the volume challenges death studies’ focus on human death, as well as the norms that govern standard approaches to studying human death. Finally, we discuss the book’s structure, including how the work included in this edited volume showcase a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of death and dying from cutting-edge research in death studies, feminist and queer studies, new materialism and waste studies, plant and animal studies, and non-Western or indigenous studies.
Death in the Fields: Microbial ‘Destruction’ in Polluted Soils
Authors: Zanzu Serena
Published: October 2024

The presence of industrial pollutants in soil is recognized as an urgent environmental concern for its damaging effects on the ecosystem. While heavy metals can cause imbalance, decline and death in the communities of microorganisms living in soil, specific microbes are also able to tolerate the contaminants and transform them into harmless compounds. Microbial responses to heavy metals, such as resistance or death, emerge as instrumental in bioremediation, a field exploring the potential for the employment, manipulation and exploitation of soil microbial communities to address anthropogenic pollution. The ‘remedial microbe’ materializes as a commodity to augment, feed and dispose of safely through microbiopolitical management practices; its death appears critical to the success of the intervention. In reconsidering death and dying beyond a functional narrative of exploitation, the chapter unsettles anthropocentric understandings of individuated death, to begin appreciating the death of communities where dead organisms are recognized in their multitude and invisibility.
Can the Baltic Sea Die? An Environmental Imaginary of a Dying Sea
Authors: Peterson Jesse D.
Published: October 2024

This chapter seeks to illustrate how claims made about the Baltic Sea’s ecological conditions contribute to an environmental imaginary of a dying Baltic Sea. Adopting an onto-epistemological approach to environmental imaginary, this chapter explores cultural and scientific representations of the Baltic Sea and how they congeal into normative assumptions related to what this sea is, ought to be, and how to keep it that way. The chapter explores how the Baltic Sea gets framed as a stable, ‘natural’ categorization and how challenges to this categorization get framed as ‘unnatural’ and undesirable. The chapter exposes how a dying Baltic Sea predominantly rests upon selective attention to particular attributes of its water. Thus, a dying Baltic Sea is one Baltic Sea among many, and a dying Baltic Sea could die from changes to any of these other attributes. The chapter ends by discussing whom a living or dying Baltic Sea benefits and arguing for a political and artistic intervention into people’s onto-epistemological relationships with marine environments as an alternative to the simplistic binary in which marine pollution results from only human interference in ‘natural’ processes.
Responding to Grievance: Mental Health and Special Educational Needs and Disability
Authors: O'Brien Nick
Published: October 2024

The responses to grievances about the mental health system and the special educational and disability system respectively provide illustration of how the priorities expressed by disability human rights have been realized in practice. Historical developments within both systems disclose key challenges arising from the contested function of the positive ethical state and from the limited opportunity for the fully active participation of both street-level bureaucrats and citizens. Despite recent advances and continuing momentum, increased social advocacy in case-conferencing tribunals, positive social rights interventions by ombuds and forms of civic mediation that are deliberative and problem-solving rather than adjudicatory remain in tension with legalistic constraints that inhibit responsive legality and postliberal administrative justice.
Postliberal Administrative Justice
Authors: O'Brien Nick
Published: October 2024

There are three key focal points for the construction of postliberal administrative justice: the citizen-agency of street-level bureaucrats, alongside the positive democratic culture and mandate of public authorities; the active participation of socially embedded citizens in finding solutions to the problems disclosed by their grievances; and the bridging capacity of administrative justice institutions in developing social advocacy, participatory readiness and purposive intervention. A framework for postliberal administrative justice emphasizes the practical function of public authorities as vehicles of democratic agency, of civic association as a source of social advocacy and social conversation, of the individual as democratic and participative citizen and of administrative justice institutions as integrated but dispersed, problem-solving and bridging agencies and exercises of organizational phronesis. The familiar everyday problem of school exclusions offers illustration of the way in which responsive postliberal options might serve as an alternative to more conventional and legalistic approaches.
Coping and Surviving
Authors: Roche Zach
Published: October 2024

After being rejected for an insolvency arrangement, a mortgage holder is left in a difficult and precarious position. They are unwilling to give up and allow repossession, but they cannot recover. This is situated through Berlant’s cruel optimism, where the object of our desire is ultimately harmful to our flourishing. Debtors remember the dream they had (see Chapter 3) of a good life, and it is this belief that they can recapture this vision of a good life which encourages them not to give up. Girard’s concepts of mimesis, scapegoating, and sacrifice are used to explain how debtors engage in the coping process. They come to believe that there are dishonest debtors out there who are living the good life thanks to their dishonesty. Some of these debtors come to believe that some mortgagors must be sacrificed through eviction in order for the system to remain stable. Others become determined to resist neoliberal norms and begin to adopt a destructive and toxic attitude towards their creditors. For example, they often refuse to pay even though they are able, coming to willingly embody the creditor stereotype of the professional or reckless debtor.
Conclusion: Thriving beyond Debt
Authors: Roche Zach
Published: October 2024

The conclusion summarizes the main arguments for the reader and considers whether it is possible for us to thrive beyond debt. The key takeaways of the book are the power of the lived experience approach, which enables us to see the debt relief process through the eyes of those who have really been there. The economic theology approach has also enabled us to explain some of the seemingly irrational behaviour of debtors by seeing it through a moral and theological lens. The book concludes by arguing that in addition to a new jubilee (a mass cancellation of debt), we must support a reform in the systems of debt relief. Cancelling debt without such reforms would simply land us back in the same position again in the future, repeating the cycle. Key to this reform is a renewed perception of debt relief as an instrument of welfare. We have destigmatized lending but without destigmatizing bankruptcy, with disastrous results.
Policy Mobilities and Assemblage Theory: Key Concepts
Authors: Lewis Steven , Spratt Rebecca
Published: October 2024

This chapter delineates the key theoretical resources – namely, policy mobilities (PM) and assemblage theory (AT) – that inform our conjoined PMAT approach, which seeks to better understand policy movement in a time of unprecedented connectivity and complexity. First, it discusses PM as a broad area of work focused on identifying and conceptualizing how policy moves through multiple and diffuse means, and also what happens when policy moves. This is followed by a discussion of the relatively dense array of concepts that comprise Deleuze and Guattari's AT. Given the complexity of AT concepts, considerable space is dedicated to a careful explanation of these concepts, as well as how they work as tools for thinking and as method. The key purpose of this chapter is to present a concise overview of both PM and AT that is accessible, regardless of the readers' existing familiarity with such theoretical traditions.
Policy Mobilities and Assemblage Theory: A Conjoined Approach
Authors: Lewis Steven , Spratt Rebecca
Published: October 2024

This chapter begins by summarizing the key points of synergy between policy mobilities (PM) and assemblage theory (AT), which is the basis for developing a conjoined PMAT approach. The key features of PMAT are delimited, presented as four distinct but related orientations for thinking that respond to four fundamental questions: Where is policy? What is policy? Why is policy? and How to do policy research? Within each orientation for thinking, associated research questions are offered to help demonstrate how PMAT might be applied to a research problem. The chapter finishes with reflections on the potential uses and limits of PMAT for policy research, both specific to comparative and international education (CIE) and more generally, before then introducing the subsequent chapters.
An Introduction to Drug Policy Constellations
Authors: Stevens Alex
Published: October 2024

This chapter shows why drug policy is such a fascinating field for the development of ideas that explain the outcomes of policy processes. It defines and explains the concepts that are used in the book, including illicit drugs, policy, power, morality and policy constellations. It provides a guide to reading the book and explains its structure. It also provides links to the book’s online appendices.
Locally Driven Innovation Through Teacher Peer Mentoring in Times of COVID-19: A Professional Learning Community in Rural El Salvador
Authors: Rosekrans Kristin , Morán Celia , Bodewig Carolina
Published: October 2024

The global trend in governments’ responses to school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic was to transition to online learning and provision of materials, which was also El Salvador’s response despite many students lacking access to the internet and adequate devices. Schooling was reduced to filling out worksheets, leading to ineffective learning that lacked meaning. This chapter presents, through primary data collected from teachers, parents, and students, an experience in rural El Salvador where a group of teachers dedicated themselves to ensuring that their students continued learning throughout the pandemic. Contrary to global curricular trends that prioritize improving reading speed over meaning, these teachers facilitated learning based on a sociocultural and communicative approach to literacy development. When government support arrived through centralized training, these teachers already had their own professional support community. This organizational capacity likely stemmed from their history during the Salvadoran Civil War and popular education practices developed in that period. This experience encourages governments, donors, and local organizations to: (1) promote literacy development rooted in meaning and socioemotional learning over reading speed; (2) change traditional centralized teacher training and turn towards learning communities; and (3) leverage the power of local history and relevant cultural factors for local solutions.
Contrasting Trends of Low-Fee Private Schools in the Dominican Republic and Honduras: Dialectical Relationships and the Ethos of Privatization
Authors: Caravaca Alejandro , Moschetti Mauro C. , Edwards D. Brent , Bonal Xavier
Published: October 2024

When compared to other world regions, there is very little research on how the trend of ‘low-fee private schools’ (LFPSs) has shaped educational provision in Central America and the Latin Caribbean. Arguably, the region is ripe for LFPS expansion, given that universal access to basic public education is still a major challenge for many countries and that government inaction provides an opportunity for private involvement in education. This chapter responds to this gap by explaining and comparing LFPS trends in Honduras and the Dominican Republic, and by situating these changing trends within the larger and deeper conditions and characteristics of these two contexts, which, as we will show, are witnessing both new and previously unacknowledged forms of privatization as opportunities emerge at the intersection of global and local constraints. In concluding, we suggest that more research is needed that attends to larger political-economic constraints, dialectical relationships, and what we label the ‘ethos of privatization’. Research will help to shed light on – and to problematize – the often simplistic assumptions and concepts that are employed to make sense of global-local dynamics in education policy, both in the so-called Global South and the Global North.
Introduction
Authors: Butler Nick
Published: October 2024

The introduction outlines the book’s central questions: what do jokes do to us, and what do we do to others when we make jokes at their expense? We’re accustomed to thinking of humour as a diversion from the serious side of life. But probe a little deeper and we see another side to humour. In the not-serious world of jokes, anything is permitted and everything is fair game, and this is what makes humour so seductive and so insidious.
Body Double
Authors: Butler Nick
Published: October 2024

Chapter 5 examines the relation between humour and the body. Traditionally, bodily functions like urination and defecation have served as the ripest material for comedy. Scatological jokes liberate us from the norms of politeness and decorum, but they also offer a reprieve from repressive social structures. This is the view of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose concept of ‘carnivalesque humour’ captures the renegade spirit of laughter and provides an antidote to the stern diktats of state and church. Inspired by Bakhtin, contemporary thinkers see carnivalesque humour – rooted in the lower bodily stratum – as a means of popular resistance against despotic regimes. But comic ribaldry isn’t always a progressive force in society. As the chapter argues, the far right stokes division in the culture wars by characterizing certain types of bodies as disgusting and hilarious. Scatological jokes invoke a combination of repulsion and amusement, a volatile mix of feelings that’s sometimes used to delegitimize the rights of gay and transgender people. At its worst, body-based humour has the capacity to reframe real physical violence as a bit of knockabout fun – an effect that plays out with tragic consequences in the public sphere.
Conclusion
Authors: Harrison Graham
Published: October 2024

The chapter makes a general summary of the body of the book. It then discusses the deep incommensurability between two ostensible close sibling proto-ideologies. It shows how each treats theoretical underpinnings differently: Democratic Marxist Nationalism (DMN) seeks a parsimonious approach to politics, whereas Identitarian Socialism is more hybrid and inclusive. The former is more concerned with sharpness or analysis, the latter the ability to present appealing and smart commentary. DMN’s commitment to democracy leads it to express itself in venues that are non-socialist, whereas Identitarian Socialism is more ‘brand-aware’. Looking forward, DMN has yet to identify a politically persuasive conceptualisation of political agency, substituting an expectation of mass working-class democratic agitation. Identitarian Socialism, on the other hand, actively celebrates a wide range of activisms, but its frontal focus on mass systemic crisis makes it difficult to see how a socialist alternative might arise. The book concludes that both will remain proto-ideologies unless or until they establish stronger grounds for a proximate and distinctive socialist future.
Introduction: Canaries in the Coal Mine
Authors: Korkmaz Emre Eren
Published: October 2024

Surveillance technologies developed in migration and border management can spread to other fields and affect an entire society. Suppose the lie detectors piloted on borders are successful and they meet no significant opposition from society, then we should not be surprised to see lie detectors in workplaces or in police stations in the near future. This, in turn, would mean new mechanisms of oppression in society at large.
When it comes to social issues, advanced statistics can be manipulated in favour of the powerful, with probable options being presented as inevitable or actual. This encourages an approach that perceives such situations as neutral and objective, magnifying the algorithm and obscuring the structural factors. This can cause serious problems in migration and border management.
Migration and (Big) Data Analysis
Authors: Korkmaz Emre Eren
Published: October 2024

Big data analysis has exciting potential in migration and border management and humanitarian emergencies. Inferences made from data sets allow us to analyse the basic characteristics and dynamics of mass movements and make predictions about the future.
This chapter discusses how private companies’ dominance over big data analysis should be questioned more vigorously. Companies that collect and analyse data have better capacity than states and UN agencies to monitor and direct ‘transient’ people. Strong legal protections do not exist regarding privacy and consent in many countries on migration routes.
Because of active national and international use of smartphones, social media and mobile banking, companies have become the biggest collectors and analysts of data. As most of these companies rely on the business model of surveillance capitalism, this provides invaluable resources to capitalism for the surveillance, manipulation and steering of people in a given direction.
Conclusion: How Can We Resist?
Authors: Korkmaz Emre Eren
Published: October 2024

This chapter summarizes the uses of surveillance technologies in migration, border management and humanitarian aid, to explain contemporary capitalism’s mainstream approach to migration and the motivations behind the investments of tech companies.
Given the far-reaching effects of these technologies, it is evident they will soon have consequences for humanity as a whole. Migrants, asylum seekers and refugees have much weaker legal status than those of citizens, and states claim the authority to control those who cross their borders by invoking their sovereign rights. The fields of border and national security are more secretive, face less scrutiny and leak less information, and societies take a less sympathetic approach to migrants and foreigners. This allows tech companies, along with military and financial firms and security bureaucracies, to do as they please on the global stage, and implement the most speculative AI or blockchain projects.
The Big Picture: Social Change Makers and Social Change Organisations in Historically Variable Contexts
Authors: Roth Silke , Saunders Clare
Published: October 2024

Chapter 2 sets out the macro-level components of the book’s argument. It introduces the concept of historically variable contexts and examines key projects of social change. It explores different relationships between SCOs and the state, showing how they are shaped by organisations’ values and tactical choices as much as by regime types. It discusses interaction between different modernisation processes, illustrating how these have been shaped by and shape SCOs. Given that historical processes are deeply intertwined rather than following a strict chronological order, the chapter pursues three historical sequences of social change. The first thread begins with colonisation processes, which underpinned the emergence of racialised capitalism, were intertwined with the development of humanitarianism and led to independence struggles. The second thread turns to the emergence of socialism as a response to capitalism and discuss the mixed economy of welfare involving charities, self-help groups and the state. The third thread addresses the rise of fascism in the first half of the 20th century and discusses contemporary populist movements. The chapter demonstrates that different regime types give rise to different types of SCOs and, conversely, that different types of SCOs can contribute to the emergence of different regime types.
Paths to Agreement in Participatory Democracy: Three Cases in Yucatán
Authors: Puga Cristina
Published: October 2024

At the local level of Mexican politics, civil society still finds ways to influence governments and become part of important decisions. In several Mexican cities, large and small, civil society participation has enriched public affairs, showing that effective collaboration among sectors is possible. This chapter deals with three examples of such collaboration in the past two decades from the State of Yucatán, where government and civil society can boast several experiences that have united different actors to confront local problems and forge satisfactory solutions. Although some severe social conflicts in the state reflect the country’s prevailing problems of representation and participation, those processes also exhibit elements that are important for plural collaboration between government and society, such as good leadership, development of communicative abilities, and use of networks. A favourable political context and well-designed political strategies from demanding actors have been particularly important. The chapter reports evidence from three empirical case studies that a democratic culture-building process has become rooted in Yucatán with more speed and strength than in many other parts of the country. This includes the multiplication of civil society organizations and governments’ positive disposition to engage in collaboration with social actors.
Frames of Reference in Industrial Relations
Authors: Heery Edmund
Published: October 2024

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the 'frames of reference' in the academic field of industrial relations. In doing so, it explores notions of interests within the employment relationship and identifies different analytical approaches to the world of work that are informed by pluralist, unitary and radical frameworks. The chapter charts the movement of more unitary frames of reference into human resource management and management studies while discussing the consolidation of more critical and radical framing within industrial relations itself.
Intersectionality and Industrial Relations
Authors: McBride Anne , Rodriguez Jenny K.
Published: October 2024

This chapter critically analyses the relationship between the field of industrial relations and intersectionality. The authors argue that intersectionality – a focus on the influence of, and interrelationship between, gender, 'race', class and other characteristics – is underdeveloped in industrial relations research and call for greater sensitivity within the field to such structural inequalities, how they intersect and their relevance for the study of the employment relationship. The relationship between intersectionality and industrial relations is ambiguous, undefined and full of tensions, yet full of conceptual, theoretical, methodological and empirical possibilities. The chapter reflects on how intersectionality has 'travelled' through industrial relations by identifying trends in its use in industrial relations scholarship and wider implications for the analysis of inequalities in the industrial relations discipline.
Hesitant: Three Theses on Ecological Reparation (Otherwise)
Authors: Tironi Manuel
Published: October 2024

This chapter speculates about a situation that often marks the practice of ecological reparation: those moments in which we doubt as we meet alternative ways of defining what ecology means and how reparation is done – other ways of delimiting life from death, other modes of practicing time and grief: an ecological reparation otherwise. I articulate this reflection with and through my collaborations with Likanantai and Mapuche communities as they try to heal lands, waters and atmospheres damaged by settler-colonialism. I do not articulate a proper theoretical programme, nor do I give a thorough account of the multiple hesitations that have punctuated my collaborations. I rather address three concrete situations – which I gloss as theses – that I have elevated as minor yet potentially fruitful analytics to approach ecological reparation and its decolonization. These theses are: ecological reparation in the context of Indigenous worlds entails working in the time, ethical imperative, and material texture of spectres; it involves the articulation of a politics of the unthinkable; and it is practically and spiritually oriented towards the restitution of abundance.
Fab Cities as Infrastructures for Ecological Reparation: Maker Activism, Vernacular Skills and Prototypes for Self-Grounding Collective Life
Authors: Morita Atsuro , Tsuda Kazutoshi
Published: October 2024

The figure of the circular features in many imaginations of sustainability transition. This chapter takes up one of them, the Fab City Global Initiative, to explore the relationship between DIY activism and ecological reparation. By nurturing people’s technical skills and building networked distributed production systems, the Fab City aspires to render urban collective life a practice of recursively creating its own ground, autonomously, without depending on the state or external material flows. Circular material flows and recycle undergirds this urban autonomy, and the regeneration of the damaged environment is its corollary by curtailing the environmental impact of cities. In this vision of the circular city, the Fab City as an infrastructure for autonomous urban life, appears as an infrastructure for ecological reparation.
Land Reparations and Ecological Justice: An Interview with Sam Siva
Authors: Siva Sam , Papadopoulos Dimitris , de la Bellacasa Maria Puig
Published: October 2024

In this article and interview Sam Siva presents the work of the British Black and People of Colour collective, Land in Our Names (LION), unpacking the centrality of land reparations to any project of ecological reparation. LION’s work supports Black and People of Colour in reconnecting with land through food growing and claiming access to nature. Putting access to land at the centre of ecological justice is also about affirming the interconnectedness between ecological repair, healing and concrete reparations for damages done to people and non-humans through imperialism, colonialism and extractivism, as well as about understanding the centrality of racism to these enterprises and their persistent inheritances in the present. Together, this text and a follow-up conversation connecting the personal and the political, struggles and hopes, demonstrate the deep connection of exclusionary dynamics to contemporary concerns of justice at the heart of ecological reparation – such as climate change, the whiteness of the countryside, the rise of malnutrition and poor mental health.
Travelling Memories: Repairing the Past and Imagining the Future in Medium-Secure Forensic Psychiatric Care
Authors: Brown Steven D. , Reavey Paula , Ciarlo Donna , Balogun-Katung Abisola
Published: October 2024

Remembering can act as a work of connecting past and present, providing a connective tissue for making lives meaningful. In cases where the remembered past is traumatic or ‘difficult’ in some way, remembering constitutes an act of repair that is grounded in the very specific ecological settings and practices in which the person is located. In this piece, we discuss the case of mental health service users detained within a secure forensic inpatient mental health facility where remembering intersects with a broader notion of mental health ‘recovery’. We describe the ways in which memory comes to matter for patients and the dilemmas this creates. We focus in particular on the informal practices adopted by ward staff as they support patients’ memory work. We argue that a ‘process-ecological’ approach to remembering can inform practical decisions are around care planning and the ward design of the setting.
Sea-Level Rise and Human Mobility: The Legal Implications for Ireland’s Foreign and Domestic Policies
Authors: Cubie Dug
Published: October 2024

In October 2023, the Irish government’s Report of the Inter-Departmental Group on National Coastal Change Management Strategy concluded it was inevitable that, as a result of rising sea levels, a managed retreat may in time be required along some parts of the Irish coastline. This stark warning highlights Ireland’s vulnerability as an island nation to global climate change and sea-level rise. While adaptive measures can be made to protect coastal communities, there is a need to undertake comprehensive planning to prepare for the foreseeable impacts of climate change. Ireland is not alone in facing such risks—over a third of states in the world are directly affected by sea-level rise. Such scenarios raise complicated legal questions, which prompted the UN International Law Commission (ILC) to commence analysis in 2018 of the legal implications of sea-level rise. This article starts by examining recent developments concerning the legal implications of climate change in general, before specifically analysing the ongoing work of the ILC on sea-level rise and human mobility. Drawing on international legal and policy frameworks, the article then considers Ireland’s obligations arising from sea-level rise and population displacement. In particular, it addresses a) Ireland’s foreign policy, including international development assistance and legal migration routes for persons fleeing the impacts of sea-level rise; and b) domestic policies relating to climate change adaptation and planning for internal climate displacement.
Design of freeform-mirror-based optical systems with several stigmatic pairs
Authors: González-Acuña Rafael G.
Published: October 2024

This work introduces a new method, to the author’s knowledge, to design a freeform-mirror-based optical system from scratch by adding segments and an additional mirror. Each segment forms a stigmatic pair for a respective given field. Then, the segments of the last mirrors are concatenated with a numerical interpolation. The overall system is optimized to ensure a good performance in the fields not considered by the initial set of segments. The results are as expected by the theory and are explained with an illustrative example.