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be used for private domestic houses, where the cash-strapped family has difficult choices to make. Moreover, there is a difficult balance to be met between responding to the priorities of the family within their means, their duty of care to their neighbours, wider family and future generations and the important consideration of not undermining national building codes. Again, the need for good information is paramount, to ensure that families are aware of the consequences of the choices they make and don’t compromise the safety and welfare of neighbours and family
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.
In times of national security, scholars and activists who hail from the communities under suspicion attempt to draw readers and listeners to the complexity of the world we inhabit. For those who campaigned against the SUS law in the 1980s, when young Black men were being routinely stopped in the streets, the wave of counter-terrorism legislation and policy that exists today will be very familiar. Similarly, recent discussions about the impact of drill music in the culture of young Black men has drawn questions around the ways in which they should be securitised, with senior police calling for the use of terrorism legislation against them. In this environment, when those who study and have lived alongside the communities who are at the scrutiny of the state raise questions about the government, military and police policy, they are often shut down as terrorist-sympathisers, or apologists for gang culture. In such environments, there is an expectation on scholars and activists to condemn what society at large fears. This volume is about how that expectation has emerged alongside the normalisation of racism, and how these writers choose to subvert the expectations raised on them, as part of their commitment to anti-racism.
This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.
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.
problems on us, with risks and consequences for us, our families and future generations. The paradigm of loss and trauma – of altered views of oneself, others and the world, of the crisis of adjustment – can be found in the struggles of Northern Ireland in the wake of the Troubles. Collective biographies are marked by the ruptures of the many tragedies of the Troubles. The decadal conflict of the latter
propositions. Firstly, borrowing from O’Neill’s discussion of representing nature and future generations, it is argued that advocacy by interest groups for some constituencies simply cannot be pursued through representation style behaviour; it can only be pursued through a form of what is referred to here as ‘solidarity’. Secondly, in turn, it is argued that the legitimacy of solidarity style advocacy by groups does not require (indeed does not benefit from) internal democratic structures. That is, some interest group advocacy is founded on other – non-democratic – forms of
as autonomy for future generations. From here to sustainability; ways of reconciling political and ecological time scales There are several alternative ways of reconciling political and ecological time cycles. The most long-term binding perspectives have historically been found in physical planning, i.e., the process of directing, restricting, or even forbidding certain uses of land and resources. Planning regulations and processes infringe on present resource use to an extent that makes it perhaps the most authoritative way of reconciling political and ecological
and natural resources to achieve sustainability. • Ecological governance is spatially rational to the extent that it defines the circles of participating stakeholders and interests in goal setting and decision-making on actual resource use and management in accordance with relevant spatial scales. Ecological governance and time As an ethic principle for intergenerational equity, sustainability pits present demands on natural resources against the perceivable demands of future generations. Against the economic concept of ‘sustained development’ based on expectancy
warming policy is essentially for the benefit of future generations, throughout the world, but that policy threatens carbon-intensive sectors, in particular, with visible and immediate costs. The logic of collective action suggests that a smaller group with a narrow range of interests is more effective in organising Interests, institutions and global warming 227 itself in pursuit of those interests than a larger group. A large group is often latent, and in order to start political action it first needs to be mobilised (Olson, 1965, 1982). Future generations are perhaps