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Drawing on a Foucauldian theorisation and an in-depth study with eight disabled student activists in England, this paper explores how persistent marginalisation and ableism in higher education has triggered a wave of activism among disabled students, who, just before the advent of the pandemic, had organised a structured movement, Disabled Students UK. We employ Foucault's ideas of the care of the self and others to discuss the formation of disabled students as activist subjects fighting discrimination in English higher education, in a moment in which the intersection between inclusive policies and austerity measures exposed the ableism rooted in academic practices. This paper promotes discussion on the nurturing relationship that exists between the individual and the community in constituting disability activism and disabled activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I call for geographers to engage further with a so far under‐explored concept of the socio‐ecological imagination, which I define as a variant of political‐geographical imagination(s) concerned with envisioning (and progressing) the transformation of relationships between human society and the rest of the planetary environment. In response to escalating ecological breakdown, and a recent surge in environmental movement mobilisation(s) led in many places by young people, this paper seeks to contribute to expanding understandings of the socio‐ecological imagination, drawing on interviews and participant observation with young environmental activists in the North East of England. The paper performs two major tasks. First, through analysing the ways in which the environmentalists narrate their imaginaries of socio‐ecological transformation(s), it is argued that dominant oppositional tendencies within participant narratives result from a tension between antagonistic and imaginative forms of transformative politics. Second, the paper explores in more depth the main forces constraining the imagination of alternative socio‐ecological futures, proposing three major interconnected barriers that emerge from the environmentalists' narratives: crisis lock‐in; colonisation of the social imaginary; and dualistic temporal imaginaries of transformation. In sum, I suggest that these barriers warn of an imaginative gap between our current social reality and just and sustainable futures, driven by structural and psychological pressures faced by activists in the current era of multi‐dimensional crisis. Bridging this gap can be aided by a greater engagement of geographers and environmental movements with a socio‐ecological imagination and a processual understanding of space–time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dog fouling is recognised as antisocial, unhealthy and illegal in England, yet it persists. Much action against dog fouling happens in communities and impacts are largely unrecorded. Here, we report an activist project with primary-aged children in Bristol, England that resulted in dog fouling reductions near schools and reflects on the role of children in effecting social change in their local environment. The paper takes a New Materialist turn, de-centring experience from the individual child to the child in assemblages of more-than-human relations. Photos of children's interventions against dog fouling are presented to explore how they have used material resources and creativity to emphasise the health and social risks of faeces from a child's perspective. This provides a focus on child–faeces–environment assemblages where children adopt methods of activist art that comprise matter including the faeces to convey a new relational ontology of dog fouling and a reifying of the 'problem'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we highlight emergent trends that we have observed from direct participation in civil society organisations, and importantly the potential they have to enact transformative social change. Specifically, drawing on in-depth participation with two community organisations in Leeds in the North of England, we highlight the limits of traditional personas of the social entrepreneur and social activist and tendencies that sit between and beyond them that are more hybrid and messy, but ultimately more disruptive and productive. Through our fieldwork, we identified four aspects to this: 1.) purposeful value-rationality and attempts to explicitly foreground values in the everyday; 2.) relations as co-constructed and interdependent; 3.) the cyclical and transformative nature of practices; and, 4.) the role of storytelling in narrating and supporting alternative future visions. Ultimately, at the heart of the dysfunction of both social entrepreneur and social activist personas is an absence of conscious acknowledgements of how our work is motivated by what we love, and what we feel a loss for; what we have become disconnected from, and what we urgently need to reconnect with beyond individualised notions of social change. We contend that acknowledging these and incorporating them into our social change work can nurture more transformative values, practices, identities and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the London Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 and seeks to figure out ways of reflection on this catastrophic event without exploiting it for the sake of an academic argument. I will address situations of (human and academic) un/speakability as well as the politics of grieving in the face of such catastrophes. In doing so, I am approaching the event of Grenfell Tower by investigating chosen critical theories, and the voices of (former) residents and activists, in order to shed some light on the social and political implications triggered by the figure of leftovers, shifting between discoursive contextualizations and personal perceptions. With this, I consider why and how the tower's appalling, overtly visible leftover provokes a re-thinking of biopolitics and agency, while also linking those to theatrical terminologies, namely tragedy, which is rhetorically used to downplay the level of destruction of sociality and, in it, the state's responsibility towards its citizens in the realm of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]