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innovations in everyday medical practice to humanitarian work in the field. It seems to me a cultural, a psychosocial block. If you talk about surgery , for example, in a humanitarian setting, immediately among many NGO workers their antibodies will rise. They will say, ‘That’s terrible, you can’t allow that Western, too high-tech surgery; it is inappropriate.’ But then if you say, ‘So, what about obstructed labour and interventions to save the mother and the child?’, then
the government won’t see the difference if it is us or ICRC providing the surgery and yet we don’t have the permanent ability to address the needs of non-war-wounded patients, such as obstetrics. Indeed, surgical care available to wounded combatants had been considered a trump card to obtain guarantees of respect and protection from the opposition’s leadership, whose soldiers, according to MSF-H’s head of mission
, the medical profession (internationally) faced a dilemma between the desire to reduce or eliminate suffering and the need to carry out painful surgery. 52 This was a particularly prescient issue when it came to treating children and adolescents – those who society deemed to be most vulnerable and endangered. From the late nineteenth century, it was considered
Representational democracy is at the heart of the UK’s political constitution, and the electoral system is central to achieving it. But is the first-past-the-post system used to elect the UK parliament truly representative? To answer that question requires an understanding of several factors: debates over the nature of representation; the evolution of the current electoral system; how first-past-the-post distorts electoral politics; and how else elections might be conducted. Running through all these debates are issues over the representation not only of people but also of places. The book examines all of these issues and focuses on the effect of geography on the operation of the electoral system.
/gender identities. Although ‘transgender’ is also used as an inclusive term, it risks conflating sex and gender, pre-empting discussion of a distinction that some trans people want to retain. The term ‘transsexual’ is used by some trans people who seek to change their bodies by surgery and/or hormonal treatment; others, however, strongly reject it. As trans issues have attracted greater attention and some campaigning groups have gained political voice, trans people have increasingly been able to define their own experiences; this is reflected in changes in both everyday speech
English radicalism has been a deep-rooted but minority tradition in the political culture since at least the seventeenth century. The central aim of this book is to examine, in historical and political context, a range of key events and individuals that exemplify English radicalism in the twentieth century. This analysis is preceded by defining precisely what has constituted this tradition; and by the main outline of the development of the tradition from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Three of the main currents of English radicalism in the twentieth century have been the labour movement, the women’s movement and the peace movement. These are discussed in some detail, as a framework for the detailed consideration of ten key representative figures of the tradition in the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ellen Wilkinson, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson, Michael Foot, Joan Maynard, Stuart Hall, Tony Benn and Nicolas Walter. The question of ‘agency’ – of how to bring about radical change in a predominantly conservative society and culture – has been a fundamental issue for English radicals. It is argued that, in the twentieth century, many of the important achievements in progressive politics have taken place in and through extra-parliamentary movements, as well as through formal political parties and organisations – the Labour Party and other socialist organisations – and on occasion, through libertarian and anarchist politics. The final chapter considers the continuing relevance of this political tradition in the early twenty-first century, and reviews its challenges and prospects.
Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which is a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Assembled at the intersection of thought and practice, biosocial power attempts to bring envisioned futures into the present, taking hold of life in the form of childhood, thereby bridging being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. Taking up a critical perspective which is attentive to the contingency of childhoods – the ways in which particular childhoods are constituted and configured – the method used in the book is a transversal genealogy that moves between past and present while also crossing a series of discourses and practices framed by children’s rights (the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage and entrepreneurship education. The overarching analysis converges on contemporary neoliberal enterprise culture, which is approached as a conjuncture that helps to explain, and also to trouble, the growing emphasis on the agency and rights of children. It is against the backdrop of this problematic that the book makes its case for refiguring childhood. Focusing on the how, where and when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to researchers and students interested in examining the relationship between power and childhood through the lens of social and political theory, sociology, cultural studies, history and geography.
This work demonstrates that resistance to occupation by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Second World War has to be seen through a transnational, not a national, lens. It explores how people often resisted outside their country of origin because they were migrants, refugees or exiles who were already on the move. It traces their trajectories and encounters with other resisters and explores their experiences, including changes of beliefs, practices and identities. The book is a powerful, subtle and thought-provoking alternative to works on the Second World War that focus on single countries or on grand strategy. It is a ‘bottom up’ story of extraordinary individuals and groups who resisted oppression from Spain to the Soviet Union and the Balkans. It challenges the standard chronology of the war, beginning with the formation of the International Brigades in Spain and following through to the onset of the Cold War and the foundation of the state of Israel. This is a collective project by a team of international historians led by Robert Gildea, author of Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Faber & Faber, 2015). These have explored archives across Europe, the USA, Russia and Israel in order to unearth scores of fascinating individual stories which are woven together into themed chapters and a powerful new interpretation. The book is aimed at undergraduates and graduates working on twentieth-century Europe and the Second World War or interested in the possibilities of transnational history.
prayer, and even brain surgery. Some of these more invasive approaches are unlikely to be tried today, but others persist. Earlier in the book we mentioned yeshiva students. Psychiatric drugs are being given to Orthodox yeshiva students in Israel at the request of religious leaders and marriage counselors as a way of suppressing same-sex sexual feelings, so that the “patients” will find it easier to comply with rigid norms forbidding homosexual behavior. In the United States in 2015, the Obama administration argued that such sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) can
councillor has to carry out. We need to see if councillors cross the boundaries between aspects of life or whether they operate within a boundaryless world altogether. The office of councillor has attached to it a series of formal expectations of action in traditional political theatres of the council, but in speaking to councillors, it becomes clear that the power of that formality can spread to interaction with the public, such as in advice surgeries. As a Labour councillor summarised: If I’m at a meeting, scrutiny or council, then I’ll be standing up for what I