bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Research with deaf and hard-of-hearing women: reimagining social justice as flourishing
Authors: Meehan Grainne
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores social justice research carried out with deaf and hard-of-hearing women in Ireland. It draws on doctoral research exploring sexuality and sexual health with deaf and hard-of-hearing women to reflect on ways by which research can be designed to ensure equality, participation and inclusion is prioritised within the research methodology. It sets out the positive methodological and theoretical scaffold used to centre deaf women’s voices and subjectivities. The research framework set out offers social justice research points of reflection in relation to how social justice research with deaf people can be designed and operationalised, an approach applicable in the Irish context and beyond. Through this, the chapter illustrates how doing so allowed for rethinking and reimagining with the purpose of gaining new insights into how we can create sustainable conditions within which positive social change can be facilitated.
Households’ reproduction logic, their well-being sources, and concepts of needs and poverty
Authors: Boltvinik Julio
Published: October 2024

Reproduction schemes (RS) are built for each of the five types identified in a typology of households (HH). These show the articulation of HH (via sales, purchases, taxes and transfers) with enterprises/government and are the foundation of the concept of HH’ well-being-sources (WBS), central to my critique of poverty measurement methods (PMM) and for IPMM. To conceptualise WBS, I define HH income; consumer goods/services as ready-to-consume use values; and consumption expenditures and actual consumption. I analyse savings/indebtedness, the determinants of consumption amount, diversity and quality knowledge/skills. Next, I establish equivalences between concepts included in the RS and WBS. As WB depends on the WBS identified (current income, non-basic assets, basic assets, access to free goods, knowledge/skills, free time), trends in social well-being (WB) will be the result of the evolution of their levels and distribution. Hence, poverty measurement must consider all WBS to avoid biased results as occurs with income poverty (or poverty line, PL) and unsatisfied basic needs (UBN) methods. I finish with a discussion of the concepts of needs, poverty, and satisfiers as well as a comparison of my WBS with lists of resources by diverse authors.
Luxury and Corruption
Authors: Kuldova Tereza Østbø , Østbø Jardar , Raymen Thomas
Published: October 2024

The world has been bombarded in recent years with images of the luxurious lives and wealth of corrupt oligarchs and kleptocrats, amassed at the expense of ordinary people. Such images exploit our feelings of injustice, are taken as indicative of moral decay and inspire a desire to purge our economies of dirty money, objects, and people. But why do anti-corruption efforts routinely fail? What kind of world are they creating? Looking at luxury art, antiquities, superyachts, and populist politics, this book explores the connection between luxury and corruption, and offers an alternative to the received wisdom of how we tackle corruption.
Luxury, Anti-Corruption, and the Fantasy of Wholeness
Authors: Kuldova Tereza Østbø , Østbø Jardar , Raymen Thomas
Published: October 2024

Chapter 1 outlines the basic dynamics driving anti-corruption. Starting out with the anti-luxury sanctions against rich Russians, we show how the battle against corruption is in itself a source of enjoyment. Corruption is viewed as a moral failing of individuals, and, correspondingly, the standardized, apolitical, and highly formalistic anti-corruption measures acquire a moralistic character. They bear the promise of a better or even ideal world, albeit without a positive vision, only the eradication of evil. Although this never materializes – the measures overwhelmingly fail – what is offered is always more of the same regulations, in order to fix ever-new ‘loopholes’. It is exactly this failure that fuels the growth of regulatory regimes. As profoundly lacking beings, humans are in a perpetual search to fill this lack, chasing ‘the lost object’. Once acquired, the object is worthless; it can be enjoyed only through its prohibition. It is this very fantasy of wholeness that drives anti-corruption, allowing the multibillion business of tech and consultancies, despite repetitiously failing in their mission, to offer more of the same. In this sense, the regulatory excesses of compliance culture mirror the excesses of the luxury industry.
Luxury, Encasement, and the Emptiness of Anti-Corruption’s Ethics
Authors: Kuldova Tereza Østbø , Østbø Jardar , Raymen Thomas
Published: October 2024

Chapter 4 critically interrogates the moral philosophical underpinnings of anti-corruption and compliance, namely that of Kantian deontological ethics. As is demonstrated in great detail in Chapter 3, the compliance-industrial complex and anti-corruption strategies now involve a form of regulatory hybridization, whereby the luxury industries – seen as full of risky enablers and facilitators of corruption and therefore in need of regulation – are enlisted as collaborators and a frontline privatized police force in regulating, investigating, and reporting corruption, fraud, and money laundering. On the surface of it, this situation where luxury industries are simultaneously suspect and police officer, regulator, and regulated, seems like a perversion of ethics. But in interrogating the structure of Kant’s deontological ethics which implicitly underpins anti-corruption and compliance, this chapter demonstrates that this perverse situation is in fact entirely in conformity with Kant’s ethics. The chapter unpacks the flaws of this underpinning moral philosophical framework that, particularly in the political-economic context of neoliberal capitalism, is doomed to fail. It is argued that anti-corruption and compliance is actually just a means of moral encasement, a protective sheath that is a mere extension of the wider neoliberal order.
Menopause and the Possibilities of Male Allyship
Authors: Bardett Hannah , Riach Kathleen , Jack Gavin
Published: October 2024

This chapter is based on qualitative interviews with young cis men who had either just completed their undergraduate studies or were about to, all of whom held ambitions to move into professional and/or managerial jobs. These interviews were punctuated by conversations with their mothers about menopause at work. The chapter adds to our knowledge in terms of how others at work react to colleagues experiencing difficulties relating to menopause symptoms, which is still under-studied as a social phenomenon. The chapter unpacks the concept of male allyship in this space in order to highlight some of the associated tensions and risks but also, and more positively, some of its possibilities for equality work.
“Let’s All Be Friends”: Emotional Labor and Insider Research in Punk Subculture
Authors: Vysotsky Stanislav , Manion Donna
Published: October 2024

A considerable amount of research has been conducted on the punk and skinhead subcultures in the past two decades with scant, if any, discussion of the emotional experiences of those who investigate subcultures they simultaneously participate in. This chapter explores the emergence of methodological issues of qualitative subcultural research, its intersection with insider/outsider roles, and resultant unexpected consequences of emotional labor. The authors analyze the emotional work involved in studying subcultures as ‘insiders’ through our own experiences investigating anarcho/crust/activist and antifascist subgenres of punk. We found that insider research provided both positive and negative emotional experiences for us as researchers. Positive elements of insider research include ease in building rapport with participants, an increased feeling of subcultural capital, and building new friendships with subcultural participants. Negative elements include disenchantment, dissonance, and strain in relation to the researchers, their research subjects, and the subculture that we studied. The researchers must navigate these emotional strains while maintaining objectivity in gathering empirical evidence by managing not only our emotional state but fellow subcultural participants’ expectations and emotions. Researchers reflexively try to moderate their own expectations and mitigate others’ expectations to conduct impression management and further allow for their own research and subcultural participation.
Beverley Mullings: Social Transformations, Social Reproduction and Social Justice
Authors: Henry Caitlin
Published: October 2024

In this chapter, I profile feminist political economic geographer, Beverley Mullings. Dr Mullings’s research brings to economic geography a much-needed focus on global and intimate forms of neoliberal governmentality through an intersectional, multi-scalar analysis. Over her career, Dr Mullings has brought a sustained critique of the ways that development and state policies transform subjectivities, everyday lives and possibilities. Through a commitment to feminist political economy, she has been a leader in pushing the discipline to centre the multiple systems of oppression that shape people’s lives in space and place. Importantly, she has done this by focusing on the relationship between diaspora and home, spheres of social reproduction and the politics of praxis. In this profile, I shed light on how these three threads of her research work in concert and are each primary concerns for economic geography and geographers. Mullings’s research and her own praxis provide a more just model for doing economic geography research and academia.
Yuko Aoyama: Curiosity as Method
Authors: Haugen Heidi Østbø
Published: October 2024

Reading a scholar’s work in its entirety is a rare indulgence. It brings out themes that are less discernible in individual texts, reminding us that diversity is important not only in who we read and cite, but also in selecting whose intellectual trajectories we find occasions to publicly appraise. A bird’s-eye view on Yuko Aoyama’s work reveals a career powered by a radically curious approach. She started out by exploring core questions in economic geography – the nature of globalization, shifts toward a post-industrial society, and firm location strategies – but soon brought analytical tools from economic geography to bear on topics unconventional in the subdiscipline at the time. These have included e-commerce, video games, cultural tourism, social entrepreneurship and, most recently, energy transitions. She draws upon linguistically diverse sources to show through example that economic geographers must venture beyond the Anglophone sphere to comprehend how the global economy operates. By combining theoretical ambitions and enthusiasm for technical and social particulars, Aoyama has expanded the boundaries for what are considered valid objects of analysis in economic geography and where we search for insights into the economy.
Susan Strange: Trading Zones
Authors: Hall Sarah
Published: October 2024

In this chapter, I explore the contribution of Susan Strange’s work to economic geography. The chapter begins by locating her work within the wider field of work on the geographies of money and finance. In particular I emphasize her contribution in two main areas: first, work on the political economy of monetary relations; and second, the centrality of risk and uncertainty within the international financial system. In so doing, the chapter documents how work has been central in demonstrating the importance of a distinctly geographical approach to money and finance. For example, Strange’s work has been vital to the now extensive literature on the role of offshore spaces and place within global finance. The chapter examines how, during the financialized boom of the 2000s, while geographers’ concerns typically moved away from Strange’s research foci, this was not true in cognate social sciences, notably international political economy and heterodox economics that continued to focus on what Strange termed ‘casino capitalism’. I call for Strange’s work to again be placed centrally within work on the geographies of money and finance. I set out how her work is now more important than ever in relation to a number of empirical developments such as financial crises, the reliance on debt finance and profound changes in international monetary relations such as the growing importance of China in the international financial system.
Informal Economies: Towards Plurality and Social Justice
Authors: Ramakrishnan Kavita , Mawdsley Emma
Published: October 2024

In this chapter on informal economies, we ask what ongoing analytical moves – beyond critiques of the dominant, deterministic binaries of informality versus formality and coercion versus resistance – open up for everyday understandings of ‘work’ and new modes of urban survival. We find that examining exclusions from formal labour alongside those from housing offers particularly productive insights into informality beyond labour-worlds, as it intersects so intimately with gendered and racialized difference. Finally, we propose that (renewed) attention to embodied labour/​care can speak to a feminist, anti-racist ethics of engaging with informal work, that is attuned to plurality and social justice.
Global Economy: Geographies of Production During Crises
Authors: Vanchan Vida
Published: October 2024

Recent crises have underscored the vulnerabilities of societies and economies across the globe. The changing nature of global trade, supply chains management and production systems demands a more comprehensive approach in economic geography in order to understand and address these shifts. Economic geographers have long been well positioned in exploring this alteration and addressing the vulnerabilities. This chapter examines the key actors and processes that contribute to the global economy and the work by economic geographers in understanding the geographies of production, supply chains disruptions and economic life. It seeks to develop a more resilient approach in economic geography to understand the changing nature of global economy, production systems and societies during crises. Three key areas are identified in developing such an approach that extend beyond the existing literature and understanding of the geographies of production. They involve identifying the very processes and tasks underlying each operation and decision-making process, reconceptualizing ‘value’ and ‘risk’ and proactively managing risks.
Creativity: An Evolving Critical Debate
Authors: Schmidt Suntje
Published: October 2024

Creativity in economic geography has primarily been addressed from two perspectives. One investigates spatial dynamics in cultural and creative industries and thus utilizes a rather sectoral approach to creative economies. The second is interested in processes of generating novel and valuable outcomes and thereby approaches creative practices. Both perspectives have already produced a heterogeneity and plurality of topics and themes in economic geography. Against this backdrop this chapter seeks to elaborate and appreciate the major strands of exchange within the discipline, focusing especially on creative work and creative processes. It seeks to depicture some of the main contributions stemming from economic geography to better understand the transformation processes in (primarily Western) contemporary economies driven by knowledge- and creativity-driven work. Furthermore, this chapter aims at particularly illuminating how critical perspectives in economic geography have helped us to better address, for example, new dimensions of inclusion or exclusion and new forms of vulnerabilities of certain groups within labour markets due to the transformation processes and the shifting attention of academic research. In light of the illuminated discourses this contribution concludes by tentative addressing potential consequences for future critical work in economic geography.
Care and Social Reproduction
Authors: Strauss Kendra
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the resurgence of interest in social reproduction in the social sciences and its stalled uptake in economic geography. Charting a brief history of analyses of the relationship between productive and reproductive labour, I argue that feminist economic geographers have long called for a future research agenda for economic geography that takes seriously the domains of reproduction and care as ‘properly economic’. That reproductive labour is racialized, as well as gendered and classed, signals the imperative for feminists to take seriously the imbrication of social reproduction and racial capitalism in relation to both research and praxis.
Gender Relations and Diverse Relationship Practices
Authors: Britton Joanne
Published: October 2024

Chapter 6 again focuses on gender relationships, explaining the value of adopting a relational approach to exploring Muslim family life. It argues for centring caring roles and responsibilities and the connected emotional, intimate dimensions of people’s family lives. It begins by exploring men’s lives, which are commonly overlooked, and presents a case for closer examination of Muslim masculinities and connections between the public and private domain. The chapter then considers women’s lives, paying specific attention to motherhood as well as diverse femininities. It reflects on changes in the gendered and structural dynamics of Muslim family life and implications for gender inequality. Lastly, the chapter engages with non-normative family life by exploring albeit limited evidence of a growing diversity of relationship practices.
Generation and Intergenerational Relations
Authors: Britton Joanne
Published: October 2024

Chapter 7 focuses on changing generational relationships, roles and responsibilities, taking account of intersections and traditional, hierarchical relationships. First, it explores young people and prominent ideas of generational conflict before moving on to consider adulthood, a life-course stage which has attracted less attention. It investigates independence, productivity and caring responsibilities as distinguishing features of adulthood which shed light on the structure and arrangement of Muslim family life. It then considers older people and intergenerational transmission of resources, including an assessment of multigenerational families and households. The chapter engages with the book’s core argument that extended family is a privileged marker of difference for Muslims. It reflects on concerns about increased individualism, weakening family ties and impact of changing family formations.
Smuggling and Trafficking of Migrants in Southern Europe
Authors: Becucci Stefano
Published: October 2024

The book provides an updated, informative and theoretical ‘picture’ of migrant smuggling and trafficking in Southern Europe, focusing on Spain, Italy and Greece. The first chapter sets out the research questions, the methodology followed and the sources consulted, and makes a preliminary distinction between smuggling and trafficking. The second chapter analyses the different theoretical perspectives on smuggling. The third examines how smugglers organize migrants’ journeys before they reach Southern Europe. The fourth examines the role of foreign and national criminal players involved in migrant trafficking in host countries. The focus is on sexual and labour exploitation. The final chapter sheds light on why smuggling and human trafficking persist in Southern Europe. It considers the role of laws in countering irregular immigration and the structural economic factors related to the post-Fordist economy. Spain, Italy and Greece face a contradiction: migration policies that seek to combat irregular immigration for security and political purposes conflict with the countries’ needs for a migrant workforce to be employed in their production systems. Against this background, transnational criminal groups increase their smuggling and trafficking of migrants.
The Implementation of CITES in Norway: A Longitudinal Approach to the Assessment of Enforcement from a Species Justice Perspective
Authors: Sollund Ragnhild A.
Published: October 2024

This chapter is based on longitudinal research of the implementation and enforcement of CITES in Norway running from 2010–23. It concentrates mainly on the development of the enforcement of CITES in Norway and a change in regards to wildlife trade that took place in 2017, when the trade in reptiles went from being generally banned to partly legalized. This has entailed that reptiles as well as parrots are traded on the internet and the risk of laundering individuals who are illegally in trade with those who are traded legally. In addition, the legalization of reptile trade in Norway engenders further risk of animal abuse since anybody can buy a reptile and no demands are made concerning the skills of owners of exotic species, such as reptiles and parrots.
Online Illegal Trade in Reptiles in the Netherlands
Authors: Dominguez Isabella , Hindriks Marjan , Janssen Jordi , Uhm Daan van
Published: October 2024

The growth of internet and social media plays an increasing role in the illegal wildlife trade, including the illegal trade in reptiles in the Netherlands. Reptile species are sold on various digital platforms and become victim of this lively online underworld. Reptiles are often laundered online which results in illegal and legal interfaces. This chapter shows how the digital era has enabled traders, buyers, but also illegal entrepreneurs in the reptile business to communicate easily with each other, which complicates law enforcement in the Netherlands.
Analysis of Social and Legal Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Tackling the Illegal Killing of Wolves in Poland
Authors: Chmielewski Piotr J. , Serlikowska Agnieszka
Published: October 2024

Studies show that the number of illegal wolf theriocides in Poland is significant and increasing. According to research, between 2002 and 2020 there were 91 cases of killings. On the other hand, between 1922 and 2022 we were able to identify only nine rulings related to the wolf crimes. It should be noticed that this situation is not justified by the official state approach to killing wolves in Poland. These animals have been a strictly protected species ever since 1998 and since then there has been no issuing of state licences for general population reduction. The chapter focuses on the social and legal factors influencing the effectiveness of combating the illegal killing of wolves in Poland. Our main argument is that these factors are, at the same time, the greatest problems for law enforcement authorities to effectively counteract the illegal wolf theriocides, especially when it comes to not only anthropogenic but also financial approaches in criminal law.
Obstructing Reproduction
Authors: MacNeil Taylor Faith
Published: October 2024

This chapter draws out the politics of renting respondents’ reproductive imaginaries, and how they speak to the different lives that can be made and remade amidst precarity. The chapter explores the assumed dependentlessness embedded in the transient temporalities and dense spaces of London renting, and examines the ways that both social and private tenants’ access to social reproduction is eroded by the formulation of housing as either investment or consumption. The final section of this chapter shifts focus from the reproduction of families to the reproduction of romantic relationships.
Feeling Space
Authors: MacNeil Taylor Faith
Published: October 2024

This chapter looks at the ways that affective politics circulate within precarious rental accommodation, amidst constricted desires and difficulties in holding boundaries. Moving from a discussion of sexual constriction to feelings of ‘displaced sovereignty’ among respondents who are mistreated by, yet defend, controlling landlord behaviour, the chapter makes connections between capital’s constriction of embodied agency and the suppression of political subjectivity. In the second part of the chapter, the author explores the efforts of queer collective households to realign their homes with desire for social and political transformation, and the tensions and challenges experienced along the way.
Contesting and Politicising the Zimbabwean Crisis
Authors: Vanyoro Kudakwashe
Published: October 2024

This chapter argues that there is a productive relationship between humanitarian interventions, moral/religious politics and migration governance at the border that emerges from the discursive acts of (de)legitimising humanitarian crisis through public discourse. This politics, in turn, shapes humanitarian and protection procedures, as well as conduct to migration, that are productive yet dangerous at the same time because of their fluidity and (re)dichotomising effect. The humanitarian sphere thus takes governmental authority over migrants to the extent that it becomes a site of power in the context at hand as it constructs the legible figure of the suffering migrant through moral sentiment. It is argued here that this sphere of political discourse has become a novel site of governing immobilities in border regimes because it gives rise to practices that can exclude Zimbabweans by their classificatory nature, particularly as regimes of truth and moral sentiment regarding the crisis that gave rise to their legitimacy become contested. This situation is complicated by the outsourcing of the management of immigration enforcement to third parties who offer in equal measure remedies and complications to issues of corruption and fraud at the border. It allows religious actors, humanitarian organisations, senior migrant men and the state to be involved in an economy of turning the misery of the abject into profit as they run with ideas that allow them to realise margins from the reality of mobility.
Humanitarian Politics: Ambivalence and Undecidabilities of the Border
Authors: Vanyoro Kudakwashe
Published: October 2024

The contestations that would sometimes occur at the humanitarian meetings are the focus of this chapter’s analysis. The chapter argues that the Zimbabwe–South Africa border is a place of ambivalence and indecision, allowing humanitarian personnel and faith-based actors to protect lives but also exercise political authority over migrants in transit shelters. Humanitarian workers’ autonomy over migrants’ lives established in 2008 justified the development of transit areas which required management while working with limited resources. This took place through an agreement between humanitarian actors and faith-based actors with the municipality, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) and the police to allow undocumented migrants to reside in the transit shelters while they waited for their papers. There was a clause not to arrest those residing in the transit shelter. This agreement provided security to shelter inhabitants, although it came with certain restrictions that dictated their conduct as well as their timetable. The police would, from time to time, also violate the agreement when they deemed it necessary, which was instrumentalised by a discourse of criminalisation. Another source of ambivalence emerged from the further deterioration of resources in Musina, which led humanitarian workers and faith-based actors to be caught up in political squabbles over providing basic necessities at the men’s shelter. An example is how supporting the payment of a water bill was reduced to a question of not just what was ethical but also what was realistic within humanitarian organisations’ mandates, goals and budgets. This reveals the troubled yet productive relationship among humanitarian organisations, faith-based actors and the state that makes it difficult to know exactly what to expect from the border, revealing the limits of essentialising borders in humanitarian contexts.
“Laughing at Them in Silence”: Life in the Men’s Transit Shelter
Authors: Vanyoro Kudakwashe
Published: October 2024

This chapter dives deep into life in the men’s transit shelter and some of the men’s encounters with the shelter management’s practices, set tasks and religious ceremonies. It focuses on the space and living conditions there, which reveals the daily impact of humanitarian politics related to contestations over water as well as pastoral strategies and discourses. As highlighted in the previous chapter, the local arrangements in place would allow humanitarian personnel to protect lives but also exercise political authority over migrants in transit shelters. This ambivalence suggests that a conception of power that leaves room for appreciating migrants’ agency is needed. The chapter argues that there is a relationship of governmentality between the men and humanitarian actors highlighted by the production of the shelter space as a negotiated settlement between state and non-state actors, regulatory mechanisms meant to keep transit shelter inhabitants in the good books with police and the religious activities of the space, the rents of occupying it and other factors that altogether contribute to the penetration of power into individual body discipline. The chapter is organised around the concept of ‘minimalist biopolitics’, which helps to describe a regulatory technology of life concerned with an emerging care for life itself, as opposed to a mere emphasis on the state’s sovereign power to take life (Rozakou, 2016). This minimal biopolitics is driven by religious ritual and politics that is, in and of itself, inseparable from religion’s use of a mechanism to instil behaviour that is not at odds with the state’s attempt to police criminality associated with migrants, and to ensure that the informal agreement by humanitarian actors and the state is upheld. In this border regime, these all come together as forms of governance connected to state power in one way or another, without the actors themselves always being attentive to it.
Conclusion: Bringing Time to the Study of Migration Governance and Borders in Africa
Authors: Vanyoro Kudakwashe
Published: October 2024

This chapter summarises the important points of the book in order to make a case for the ever-increasing relevance of time, as well as to speculate on the implications of the results of the book on how we understand borders. It emphasises the importance of pushing beyond traditional resistance analysis by highlighting the limitations of any single analytical or theoretical viewpoint in presenting the deep complexity and paradox that African borders present. Anthropology and temporalised approaches’ importance is also emphasised by discussing how anthropologists of migration interested in a temporal perspective to migratory processes might apply innovative social science research methodologies to examine people with limited mobility at African borders and how they experience government.
The Permanent Red Zone: An Ethnography of Spatial Practices in the Areas of the Italian Central Apennines Affected by Earthquakes (2016–17)
Authors: Mariani Enrico
Published: October 2024

The earthquake that affected the Central Apennines between 2016 and 2017 is one of the most significant socio-economic disasters Italy has experienced in the last few years. This chapter is the result of ongoing fieldwork regarding temporary housing and emergency policies in Alto Nera (an epicentral area that includes the villages of Visso, Ussita and Castelsantangelo Sul Nera). It examines how local communities experience the post-earthquake public and physical spaces of the temporary shelters provided by the Italian government for residential and commercial activities. The focus is on how local communities narrate the current state of the reconstruction and the changes wrought on their daily habits by the processes of displacement and resettlements. These local communities are experiencing issues related to public spaces and associated social practices that have changed profoundly since the earthquake. The uncertainty concerning the reconstruction has weakened their agency and ability to think about the future, while the post-earthquake dimension of ‘permanent emergency’ exacerbates and generates new vulnerabilities. Within this framework, the ethnographic methods allow to re-articulate discourses and practices that characterize dwelling in this specific territory, within and beyond displacement and resettlements.
Adaptive Disaster Memories: Voices from the Post-earthquake Irpinia (23 November 1980)
Authors: Moscaritolo Gabriele Ivo
Published: October 2024

The earthquake that occurred on 23 November 1980 has been one of the largest disastrous seismic events in Italy. It affected a large area in Southern Italy, destroyed dozens of towns and caused thousands of deaths. After four decades, the traces of destruction, temporary solutions and reconstruction are still evident in the landscape. Above all, we can find personal experiences and interpretations of these long-term processes in the memory of affected population. Through the analysis of some testimonies collected in the affected areas, this chapter illustrates how the inhabitants perceive the changes that occurred and transmitted their experiences within the community and through the generations. These changes concern the sudden disappearance of the lived space, the loss of human life, the mourning, the choices for reconstruction and the economic changes, as well as the trauma and a shared social experience that has influenced people’s lives and expectations for years. These elements are embodied in the social fabric and, in their testimonies, local communities give a new meaning to their history. The chapter demonstrates that a long adaptation process begins after each disaster. A perspective on memory helps us to investigate in depth the complex relationships between human beings and their environment.
The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Ladder of Power: Local Politics and Society in Italy
Authors: Saitta Pietro
Published: October 2024

This chapter deals with the pandemic management in Italy. It portrays the entanglement of different administrative levels and unveils both the nature of the complex game between these levels and its resulting blurred configurations. Local set-ups are the outcome of adaptive processes that combine both technical and political aspects. Indeed, for much of the Italian political world, Covid-19 has become both a stage and an opportunity to climb the ladder of power and blow political competitors. A similar situation results in a complex framework, which does not bode well for effectiveness. Things get even more complicated when similar configurations develop within an ideological scenario that is characterized by institutional distrust and diffusion of irrational beliefs. In such a situation, social cohesion decreases, and the population follows different emotive and cognitive tactics to deal with uncertainty and fear. One of these tactics consists in the diffusion of forms of political reliance that turn into charismatic forms of political worship, a necessary condition for the consolidation of populist authoritarianism. I analyse the surrealistic case of the city of Messina (Sicily) and its Mayor, Cateno De Luca, as a particular case and ‘stage’ to expose the biases of the Italian way to the pandemics.
Afar from Vesuvius but Still at Risk: The Unstoppable Urbanization of the Naples Volcano’s Yellow Zone
Authors: Gugg Giovanni
Published: October 2024

Vesuvius is one of the most worrying volcanoes in the world, because it is located in a vast urbanized area with millions of inhabitants. After its last eruption in 1944, volcanologists believe that Vesuvius is in a dormant phase of unknown duration. To prepare for future eruptions, the Italian government issued a ‘National Emergency Plan’ in 1995, which divided the exposed area into several danger zones (red, yellow, and blue). The red zone now includes the 24 municipalities closest to the volcano and potentially affected by volcanic material. The yellow zone includes 63 municipalities across three provinces (Naples, Salerno and Avellino) and over 1 million people. While the political agenda focuses on the red zone, it dedicates less attention to the yellow zone, which is considered, wrongly, less dangerous. This chapter focuses on the Agro Nocerino-Sarnese, an area in the yellow zone comprising 16 municipalities and around 300,000 inhabitants. Historically agricultural, this area has radically changed since the Second World War, in a combination of limited restrictions on urban development and scarce prevention and preparedness measures. Therefore, the yellow zone continues to grow by pursuing chaotic patterns of urban expansion, which prevent proper risk planning.
Conclusion: Rethinking Worker Power Through Mobility
Authors: Alberti Gabriella , Sacchetto Devi
Published: October 2024

The concluding chapter draws the implications of each thematic chapter. Based on the reviewed literature and evidence it proposes a new concept for each of the themes, namely: the ‘logistics of migrant labour’ to highlight the relationality of different actors and migration infrastructures that regulate human mobility and the conflict-laden nature of such regulatory spaces; ‘social mobility power’ as a non-individualistic way to capture migrants’ mobility power within and without the workplace, centering migrant spatial practices in the labour process and global production; ‘mobility skills’ to describe migrant collective resources to move across the terrain of production and social reproduction; and ‘transnational mobility bargaining’ as the expression of migrant turnover power in the field of industrial relations. Established theorizations of worker power are thus revised, arguing that associational/community forces inside and outside the workplace may influence migrants’ ability to use their marketplace mobility through migration and to improve their conditions collectively. The book contributes to a new understanding of the politics of migrant labour that reverses the mainstream image of migrants as the ultimate form of vulnerable labour and calls for the need to overcome the historical counterposing of exit and voice in the debate on worker agency.
Polyrhythmia
Authors: Herrity Kate
Published: October 2024

If a bad day has a soundscape so too does a good one, and it is this that forms the marker for assessing deviations from stability. Reflections on a ‘good’ day, at ‘feeding time’ are drawn on to make the point that these times when nothing much is happening are key to diagnosing when something is.
Access to Justice, Digitalization and Vulnerability
Authors: Creutzfeldt Naomi , Kyprianides Arabella , Bradford Ben
Published: October 2024

This book extends existing research by examining the effect of rapid digitalization and the notion of digital justice on the delivery of justice. We follow help-seeker pathways to justice across two areas: housing and special educational needs and disabilities. We question whether a siloed landscape of advice, NGOs, tribunals and ombuds can provide adequate access to justice; what lessons about digitalization and pathways to justice can be learned; and how trust in justice – the belief that the justice system is fair, effective and open to all – can be maintained.
Legal Needs and Access to Justice
Authors: Creutzfeldt Naomi , Kyprianides Arabella , Bradford Ben , Jackson Jonathan
Published: October 2024

In Chapter 1, Legal Needs and Access to Justice, we develop the argument for a holistic vision of access to justice. We expand Wrbka’s definition of ‘the concept of access to justice that embodies the ideal that everybody, regardless of his or her capabilities, should have the chance to enjoy the protection and enforcement of his or her rights by the use of law and the legal system’ and argue that we need a broader definition. To date, access to justice is refined to a narrow ‘legal justice’ focus, involving access to legal assistance in the form of legal advice and access to resolution in the form of legal institutions. A more generous vision for access to justice is needed to include initial advice and help from non-legal support, social and community actors (for example, friends, family, advice sector, local council, specialist organizations (NGOs), schools, the internet) to be part of the delivery of access to justice. As part of this vision, we discuss the legal needs literature and propose a more generous approach to access to justice, reaching beyond legal confines. After that, we distinguish access to offline justice from access to online justice. Then, we set out theoretical frameworks through which to understand (and measure) access to justice in our dataset; namely, legal consciousness and procedural justice.
Trust in Administrative Justice
Authors: Creutzfeldt Naomi , Kyprianides Arabella , Bradford Ben , Jackson Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Through the lens of procedural justice theory, Chapter 2, Trust in Administrative Justice, captures people’s experiences of, and sensibilities towards, moving parts of the AJS online. Prior research has found that procedural justice and the trust and legitimacy it engenders helps to strengthen people’s willingness to cooperate with the police, courts and other justice institutions, and to comply with their directives and the law in general. Yet, little is known about whether and how this process ‘works’ in an administrative justice context within which interactions are increasingly occurring primarily, or solely, online. This chapter will also explore the role of emotions in the encounters with the AJS, marked by strong asymmetric dependence and power. This chapter provides the theoretical foundation for the analysis and experimental vignettes in Chapter 6.
Shifting Regimes of Historicity and the Control of Urban Futures through Infrastructures: Continuities, Ambivalences, and Tensions in the Anthropocene
Authors: Coutard Olivier
Published: October 2024

Many imagined social futures and actively promoted ‘transition strategies’ rely on infrastructure development. But to what extent can, or even should, our social futures depend on such infrastructural foundations? This chapter examines infrastructures through three interrelated temporal registers: their lifetimes and life cycles; their day-to-day operation, maintenance, and functioning; and the mediatory role they perform between social pasts, presents, and futures. Drawing from observations of, and insights from, Western (European) urban contexts in which infrastructures are ubiquitous if unequal, it demonstrates how infrastructural environments shape dominant social temporalities by materializing them. The chapter argues that long-industrialized societies have inherited from the modern era a propensity to control social futures through infrastructures but that predominant forms of ‘infrastructure-based futuring’ engender ambivalent and even contradictory implications within the Anthropocene. To address this challenge, the chapter discusses key methodological, epistemological, and political considerations for researching infrastructural, urban-regional, and social futures in the making.
A Clean Slate
Authors: Roche Zach
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores those who are successful in their application for insolvency and unpacks how this process works in detail. Once the debtor has the support of an insolvency practitioner, their chances of success increase significantly. They first apply (and get) a protective certificate, a legal instrument that prevents creditors from contacting them and gives breathing space to lodge a full application. This application will involve a 3-6-year insolvency programme where the debtor must live on a mandatory limited budget called their Reasonable Living Expenses. This is the subject of considerable negotiation between the debtor, the practitioner, and creditors. If creditors dislike the proposed arrangement, they may veto it, though this can also be overturned at a court review. In this chapter we meet the rare few who are successful in this process. In doing so, we see how they use the language of salvation to describe the feeling of being relieved from their debt burdens. This is often summarized using the phrase ‘clean slate’.
Ways of Making Change
Authors: Roth Silke , Saunders Clare
Published: October 2024

Chapter 3 looks more specifically at the ways in which SCOs go about contributing to social change. It discusses the repertoires, strategies and tactics that they use, including protest, advocacy, and service-provision. The chapter illustrates how the actions of SCOs are a set of processes stemming from how they react to each other and to the historically variable contexts in which they are active. In other words, SCOs shape and are shaped by historically variable contexts. Technologies play a crucial role for the sustainability and transformation of repertoires of SCOs. The chapter explores the key tactics of SCOs through the lens of a selection of causes. This includes violent uprisings are illustrated through struggles for the end of colonial rule. It also discusses non-violent protest and routine demonstrations, illustrated through various causes, including environmentalism. Then it turns to advocacy drawing on examples of humanitarian organisations. This is followed by a discussion of service provision by feminist organisations. The chapter shows how different causes attract varieties of tactics. Service providing SCOs represent important infrastructures for the people who participate in a variety of tactics and SCOs.
Contesting Gender Representation in Oaxaca’s Indigenous Communities
Authors: Galar Carina
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on issues of gender and indigenous representation, specifically the politics of gender-parity representation in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It highlights tensions in Mexico between legal and explicit norms, on the one hand, and tacit or community norms, on the other hand, as well as between federal, state and local norms. The state government’s gender-parity laws met with resistance from indigenous groups. Possible explanations for this resistance range from the distinctive features of political and social organization in indigenous communities, with adherence to predominantly patriarchal customs and traditions, to the institutional differences and asymmetric relationship between municipal and state powers. Taking these two perspectives as complementary, this chapter aims to deepen the current understanding of gender-parity issues in Oaxaca by analysing the construction of the ‘object’ of representation and focusing on its ‘maker’. The main idea is that what is to be represented, on the one hand, and who decides who is or can be representative, on the other hand, has an impact on both representatives and representees. This analytical perspective will contribute to understanding not only community members’ adverse reactions to appointing women councillors but also the difficulties for indigenous women in exercising representation.
Acting as a Representative: The Case of the Executive Council of Global Corporations
Authors: Tirado Ricardo , Castaños Fernando
Published: October 2024

Alongside elected politicians, other non-elected agents also act in making binding governmental decisions. They do so in the name of individuals or collective entities, such as corporations, trade associations, unions or churches. Their manoeuvres are supposed to be parallel to operations by elected representatives because they have achieved their status by other means, private rather than public. However, the two often intertwine and at times confront each other. Given that these private representatives tend to be moved by their interests and preferences, it is crucial to observe how they influence elected policymakers who ought to be concerned with the general well-being of constituents. Understanding those effects is crucial if we are to assess the quality of democracy in a country. During Mexico’s long democratic transition (in the late 20th century), several business associations gained visibility. This chapter focuses on the Executive Council of Global Corporations (Consejo Ejecutivo de Empresas Globales, CEEG), which emerged in 2004 and has significantly impacted public decisions. The chapter has four main sections and a conclusion. The first section is devoted to the birth of the organization. The second analyses how it built its object of representation. The third and fourth explain the organization’s operations and conduct.